IV. Medieval drama in eastern Europe
JOHN STEVENS/RICHARD RASTALL (I–III, 3(iv), IV; V), JOHN STEVENS (with JACK SAGE)/RICHARD RASTALL (III, 3(v)), RICHARD RASTALL (III, 3(vi))
The many Latin terms used by medieval writers to refer to dramatic representations include ordo, officium, ludus, festum, miraculum (rare), misterium and, most frequently, representatio. Each vernacular has an equivalent variety. None of these terms is used consistently, nor is any used exclusively (cf English ‘play’) to denote a drama. The terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ are very rare and are not applicable in their traditional meanings. Of the above terms, ordo and officium are commonly used to describe liturgical ceremonies as well as plays; this draws attention to a fundamentally important but elusive distinction between ritual and drama. When describing vernacular plays, medieval writers used the terms ‘miracle’ and ‘mystery’ without distinction; in this article, ‘miracle’ denotes a play based on the life of a saint, ‘mystery’ a play on a biblical or apocryphal subject. These may both be categorized as ‘historical’ as opposed to the ‘fictional’ character of the morality plays (see Knight, 1983).
The corpus of medieval drama in Latin and the major European vernaculars is huge. It comprises, essentially, two types of religious drama. In the first, traditionally called the ‘liturgical drama’, music is integral: the whole text of the play is sung monophonically and the language is Latin. In the second, vernacular drama, the main action is conducted in the spoken vernacular, with songs and instrumental music, plainchant and polyphony, introduced as appropriate. The principal vernaculars to be considered are English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, in all of which a substantial repertory of plays has survived; there is a smaller corpus from the Netherlands and another from eastern Europe. In addition to these religious plays there are isolated secular plays of various types from the 13th century onwards. It is not until the end of the Middle Ages that coherent traditions of secular drama can be traced (English interludes, French farces and sotties etc.). In all medieval secular plays the music is incidental.
An older generation of scholars (Chambers, Young etc.) believed that the liturgical drama, starting in its simplest form as the Quem queritis dialogue, evolved over the centuries until it took on more realistic forms such as the mystery cycles of the later Middle Ages. This metaphor of organic growth has been increasingly questioned over the years (see Hardison, 1965). Unfortunately, a consideration of the nature and function of music in medieval drama has not played much part either in the formation or in the critique of the traditional interpretation.
The first substantial collection of the musical texts of liturgical plays, Coussemaker’s Drames liturgiques du Moyen-Age (1860), still holds the field, despite its inaccuracies; but numerous single plays are available in scholarly periodicals and separate editions (e.g. Lipphardt, 1963, Krieg, 1956, Vecchi, 1954) and in performing editions with English translation (see Smoldon, 1960 etc., Greenberg, 1959, and Bailey, 1965). The ten plays of the important Fleury Playbook are published in an edition by Tintori and Monterosso (1958). The musical insertions into vernacular plays are rarely notated (but see Dutka, 1980, for music from the English biblical cycles and Brown, 1963, for a late French secular repertory).
Musical study of the drama still lags behind the literary; but the studies and articles of Lipphardt (especially his ‘Liturgische Dramen’ in MGG1), of Corbin (in LaMusicaE, on the Song of the Sibyl (1952), and on the planctus, in La déposition, 1960) and of Smoldon (1980) are the necessary starting-point for serious study of the sung drama; for the vernacular spoken drama in English see Rastall, 1996. On the literary side the works of fundamental importance in English are E.K. Chambers’s The Medieval Stage (1903/R), still unsurpassed as a general survey, and Karl Young’s The Drama of the Medieval Church (1933/R), which gives the literary texts of almost the entire corpus of Latin religious drama. Young’s work must now be supplemented from Walther Lipphardt (1975). Grace Frank’s The Medieval French Drama (1954) and N.D. Shergold’s A History of the Spanish Stage (1967) are the only scholarly books in English covering their subjects; there are no equivalents for German or Italian plays. Muir (1995) provides a study of all European biblical drama, however.
In this article plays from the 10th century up to the Reformation are surveyed. The ecclesiastical upheavals of the 16th century brought about the suppression of medieval traditions of religious drama in Protestant countries and modified them severely in countries which remained Catholic.
Controversy has gone on for years as to what constitutes drama. For some inquirers dialogue has been essential; for others, impersonation (pretending to be someone in the story). Thus, for Young (1933/R), the moving ecclesiastical ceremonies of Holy Week are only in the loosest sense dramatic, since the element of impersonation is almost lacking. For present purposes, and indeed for the medieval period in principle, the concept of impersonation cannot be regarded as crucial – except in monologue. In this article the widest definition is used, admitting as drama any action in which the speeches, or songs, of two or more personages (realistic or symbolic) are opposed or juxtaposed.
No-one now believes either that European drama perished utterly with the destruction of the Roman theatres in the 6th century, or that it had to be invented again in the 10th. All the evidence, fragmentary as it is, testifies to a wealth of dramatic activity of various kinds in the early Middle Ages, much of it involving music. Travelling minstrels, variously designated in Latin as mimi, histriones, joculatores, menestrelli, lusatores and so on, combined music and acting with other sorts of entertainment – tumbling, bear-leading, juggling, puppetry (see Minstrel). These were professionals, playing (in many senses) for hire. Their repertory may have included simple pieces of the fabliau type (a comic tale, often grotesque or obscene), such as the Interludium de clerico et puella (13th century) and Le garçon et l’aveugle (13th century; see Axton, 1974); mimed monologues, such as Rutebeuf’s Dit de l’herberie (13th century; cf the sales talk of the spice merchant in the Resurrection plays); scolding matches, ‘flytings’, estrifs, or demonstrations of clever repartee, such as Le roi d’Angleterre et le jongleur d’Ely (13th century); courtly narratives with interpolated song, such as the chante-fable Aucassin et Nicolette (13th century); and semi-dramatic lyrics, such as Mei amic, an 11th-century Provençal song dialogue for the Annunciation. To have some cognizance of this professional and of other traditions is essential if the musical elements of the drama are to be seen in their proper nature.
One important tradition is that of the dance-song, both courtly and popular. The dancing by courtiers and their ladies of ‘rondets de carole’ was described by Jehan Bretel in the Tournoi de Chauvenci (13th century); and scraps of (apparently) courtly dance-song are preserved in Guillaume de Dole (c1228) by Jehan Renart and in other courtly poems (refrains; see Refrain). Knowledge of popular dance-song is gained chiefly from courtly adaptations or imitations – though in this early period the distinction between two ‘cultures’, courtly and popular, is far less sharp than later. Such miniature song-dramas include versions of Bele Aelis (e.g. that by the trouvère Baude de la Kakerie); the Provençal song of the April queen, Al’entrada del tens clar; perhaps Tempus est jocundum from the Carmina Burana (c1230); and the English Maiden in the mor lay (Dronke, 1968, 3/1996). In German drama especially (from the later Passion play of the Carmina burana onwards), Mary Magdalen’s sinful life is depicted as a dance with her in the centre; she buys cosmetics, sings and dances to entice her lovers. A different type of courtly activity produced the Teutonic warrior-play; its existence and the presence of musical effects in it were mentioned by the German chronicler Gerhoh of Reichersberg (c1160), and its influence can be traced in the sung liturgical-political play Antichristus (c1160) from Tegernsee (Axton, 1974). A later courtly milieu delighted in the dramatic spectacle of the chivalric tournament, a species of mimed heroic drama at which ladies were present and music and dancing added to the social delights (Wickham, 1959–72, 2/1980–81).
Other types of lyric besides dance-song may have sprouted into drama. These include the aube or Alba (lovers’ dawn-song), the Chanson de toile (‘weaving-song’; usually a woman’s dramatic monologue), the bergerie (shepherds’ games) and the pastourelle (knight encounters maiden). The two last, for instance, with associated music, form the basis of Adam de la Halle’s Robin et Marion (see §III, 2(iii) below). Another lyric type, the debate (Provençal joc-partit; Fr. Jeu-parti) is self-evidently a dramatic form and has a long musical as well as poetic history (see Troubadours, trouvères). Sung dramatic debates range from the sublime (Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo virtutum, ?1150s, in the morality tradition) to the near-ridiculous (some of the courtly riddles of Adam de la Halle and his contemporaries in 13th-century Arras). However, of all European song forms, that which most specifically contributed to the drama is the Italian Lauda; the earliest Italian vernacular plays are laude in dialogue (see §III, 3(iv) below). But the tradition of the Latin Planctus or lament was even more widespread, and some historians have seen the whole of medieval drama embryonically in the scene where Mary sorrows at the foot of the Cross. In German drama the Marienklage is of central importance (see §III, 2(i) below). The planctus naturally developed as sung dialogue between the lamenter and the bystanders (Mary and the apostle St John; Rachel and her consolers).
Another element of importance particularly for the formation of the religious drama was the Song of the Sibyl, a prophecy of Christ’s birth, of great antiquity. It found its way into the Christmas liturgy in the 8th century and in the drama belongs with the Ordo prophetarum, the Procession of the Prophets. Its music as well as its words are traditional (Corbin, RdM, 1952). The Procession of the Prophets originated from a famous sermon, Contra judeos, attributed to St Augustine, which was read at Christmas Matins and incorporated the Song of the Sibyl and many other prophecies. Other sermons, such as the Spanish Castissimum Marie virginis, may also have been dramatized (Donovan, 1958).
However, the most imaginative and impressive form of drama in the early Middle Ages remains the liturgy itself. Honorius of Autun, in Gemma anime (c1100), described the Mass as a drama analogous to ancient tragedy (trans. Hardison, 1965; Latin text in Young, 1933, i, 82):
our tragic author [i.e. the celebrant] represents by his gestures in the theatre of the Church before the Christian people the struggle of Christ … By the extension of his hands he represents the extension of Christ on the Cross. By the chant of the Preface he expresses the cry of Christ on the Cross.
More strikingly dramatic than the Mass in their imaginative impact are, in particular, the ceremonies of Holy Week. The blessing of palms, for instance, on Palm Sunday was followed by a procession to a place symbolizing the Mount of Olives, to the singing of Gloria laus. Sometimes, especially in Germany, a figure representing Christ riding on an ass (the Palmesel) was brought into the church. (A procession is part of the action in many liturgical plays; the Corpus Christi procession, instituted in 1264 (confirmed 1311), contributed to the growth of vernacular drama.)
Two ceremonies are particularly dramatic: the Depositio crucis, commemorating the burial of Christ; and the Elevatio crucis, celebrating the Resurrection (Young, 1933, i, 112ff; Corbin, La déposition, 1960). A striking liturgical action, which was to have a long history both in the liturgical drama and in the mystery cycles and Passion plays, was sometimes combined with these two ceremonies and sometimes with the return of the Palm Sunday procession to the church; this was the Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ descends to hell, calls on Satan to open the gates (‘Tollite portas’; cf Psalm xxiv) and releases the imprisoned souls of the patriarchs. At the abbey of Barking, Essex, in the 14th century these souls were represented by the members of the convent who were ‘imprisoned’ in the chapel of St Mary Magdalen. The existence of such a wide variety of dramatic and semi-dramatic ceremonies within the authorized liturgy of Mass and Office should be some safeguard against placing too high an importance on the single dialogue-trope, the Quem queritis, as the source of everything that can truly be called drama inside and outside the medieval church.
1. Chronology and distribution.
2. The repertory: dramatic and musical material.
3. The repertory: dramatic presentation.
5. Notations and problems of transcription.
6. Musical style and musical structure.
7. Interpretation and performance.
Medieval drama, §II: Liturgical drama
Scholars have continued to use the traditional term ‘liturgical drama’ to describe the corpus of sung religious dialogues, ceremonies and plays in Latin since it was first coined (Clément, 1847–51). Despite its drawbacks – many of the plays are paraliturgical rather than strictly a part of the liturgy – the term has more than one appropriateness: the plays are found for the most part in liturgical books, and they are animated by the spirit of the liturgy and not by that of the theatre, a totally anachronistic term and concept. Their liturgical spirit, a spirit of ceremonial reverence and joy, adds to the difficulty already discussed of distinguishing between liturgical drama and the drama of the liturgy, between play and ceremony. On the evidence of text and music alone the distinction is often impossible. Helmut de Boor (1967) defined ceremony (ordo, officium) as ‘everything that was created for presentation within the limits of ecclesiastical ritual’; play, as everything outside the realm of liturgy, whether in Latin or in the vernacular, whether performed in church or out. But a distinction that is so hard to draw in practice perhaps does not matter greatly. What matters is to regard each piece as an entity, combining in itself the elements of text, music and drama. Unless special circumstances are involved, all types of text are here referred to as ‘plays’.
The complexity of the repertory can be gauged by considering as a starting-point some manuscripts associated with one of the main dramatic centres, the abbey of St Martial at Limoges. They were formerly in the abbey library and reflect the intense musical activities of an ‘école aquitaine’ (Chailley, 1960). Out of a group of nearly 20 manuscripts, three are of special interest. F-Pn lat.1154 (9th–10th century) contains (among other items, liturgical and non-liturgical) planctus (laments) on the death of Charlemagne and others, pieces on the Last Judgment, hymns, a prose to St Martial and the Song of the Sibyl (see Early Latin secular song). F-Pn lat.1240 (10th century) contains the earliest surviving version of the Quem queritis (facs. in Young, 1933, i, pl.6; conjectural transcr. in Smoldon, 1968). F-Pn lat.1139 (1096–9) contains an isolated version of the Quem queritis (i.e. without liturgical context), with rubric ‘Hoc est de mulieribus’; the play Sponsus, followed by a prophet play; and an Ordo Rachelis, a short liturgical play of the Holy Innocents containing Rachel’s dramatic lament. (For this repertory as a whole see St Martial and Sources, ms, §§II–III.)
These three manuscripts alone provide an ensemble of items, all of them written down by the end of the 11th century and some much earlier. They show how diverse elements can be found in the same milieu (allowing for a range of date) and, in the case of the third manuscript, how at an early date the same compiler would collect plays both ‘rudimentary’ (Quem queritis) and ‘advanced’ (Sponsus, which contains vernacular stanzas and refrains) with a liturgical ceremony (Ordo Rachelis) which is in effect no more than a simple dramatic trope of two speeches to the responsory Sub altare Dei. It cannot be too often emphasized that there is no orderly chronological development to be discerned in the liturgical drama. The fact that the well-known description of a quite elaborate Visitatio sepulchri play at Winchester (see Young, 1933, i, 249) dates from the 10th century is a further reminder. A useful chronological index of liturgical plays, based on Young, was compiled by Hardison (1965, appx II); and Smoldon compiled a list of manuscripts arranged by countries within each century (1980, appx).
The complexity of time is matched by a complexity of place: the liturgical drama was not diffused in equal richness all over Europe. In addition to the ‘school’ of St Martial already mentioned, St Gallen (Switzerland) and Winchester were important early centres. The latter may have derived ceremonies from Ghent and Fleury (St Benoît-sur-Loire); and Fleury was sufficiently active in the 12th century to have produced the playbook that now bears its name. In France ‘the greatest number of texts and the longest plays come from the northern provinces of Reims and Sens’ (Wright, 1936). Here, as elsewhere, both monasteries and cathedrals contributed. An expanded Easter dialogue is associated with the region of Passau (south-east Germany), the Mary Magdalen scene (with introductory laments) with Normandy and Norman Sicily (Lipphardt, MGG1). In Italy, Padua and Cividale were especially productive; and in Spain, the cities of Catalonia and the island of Mallorca (Donovan, 1958). The liturgical drama, despite its early start in 10th-century Winchester, is not widely represented in the records of medieval England; but Lichfield, Barking, Lincoln, Malmesbury and York are known to have had plays. It should further be remembered that England was a hub of Norman culture in the two centuries following the Norman Conquest; and the widespread appointment of Norman abbots and bishops is likely to have stimulated the introduction of liturgical ceremonies and plays from one of the liveliest dramatic regions in Europe. However, no single extended dramatic representation survives.
Medieval drama, §II: Liturgical drama
The analysis of the repertory by type and subject has the authority of Young (1933/R). His analysis has been followed by most later scholars of the drama and by musicologists and is still a convenient frame of understanding. Its neat and helpful divisions and the orderliness with which simple examples precede complex ones must not, however, mislead the inquirer into false assumptions, already referred to, about orderly chronological development. As liturgical drama is in the strictest sense music drama, to describe the repertory of some 600 texts assembled by Young (1933/R) and Donovan (1958, from north-east Spain) is in fact to describe the scope of the musical repertory.
The simplest forms of dramatic ceremony or play are dialogue tropes of the introit of the Mass. By far the most important and common are the Quem queritis dialogues of Easter (fig.1; see also ex.7 below) and Christmas. At Easter the dialogue is between ‘Christicole’ (worshippers of Christ) and ‘celicole’ (dwellers in heaven); in many texts the former are precisely identified with the three Marys visiting the tomb of Christ and the latter with angels at the tomb. At Christmas the dialogue is between the shepherds seeking the crib and the midwives (non-scriptural). Other dialogue tropes exist: for example, a 14th-century Spanish one for the Assumption of the BVM (Donovan).
Particularly in its enlarged forms the Easter dialogue is frequently found, from the 10th century to the 16th, in a different liturgical position. Instead of being attached to the introit of the Mass, it is placed after the third responsory of Matins of Easter, Dum transisset sabbatum; it is also amplified by prefatory and concluding sentences, mostly well-known antiphons. The enlarged dialogues are known generically as the Visitatio sepulchri; they account for over 400 surviving texts, about two-thirds of the total repertory. Three degrees of dramatic elaboration are normally distinguished: ‘one in which the dialogue is conducted by the Marys and the angel, a second in which are added the apostles, Peter and John, and a third which provides a role for the risen Christ’ (Young, 1933, i, p.239). The Visitatio sepulchri, it is essential to realize, is never extended backwards to include scenes from the Passion and Crucifixion; it exists solely to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection.
Musically, these elaborations call for additions of various kinds. Traditional antiphons, already mentioned, are added, such as Alleluia, Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro (found in such early books as Hartker’s Antiphonary, CH-SGs 390–91; PalMus, 2nd ser., i); Venite et videte locum (Hartker, and Winchester Troper); Currebant duo simul (Hartker); and, by way of preface, [Et dicebant ad invicem:] Quis revolvet nobis lapidem ab ostio monumenti? (Hartker). The Easter sequence Victime paschali (11th century, attributed to Wipo, an imperial chaplain) is sung in various dramatic arrangements but always to the traditional melody (LU, 780). Hymns, for example Jesu nostra redempcio, are sung by the Marys or by the apostles, and Christ ist erstanden by the congregation near the end (before the final Te Deum). Laments (planctus) are sung by the three Marys as they approach the tomb, the most common set of three being the 15-syllable Heu, nobis internas mentes, Jam percusso ceu pastore and Sed eamus et ad eius; the music of these is thought to be non-Gregorian (see §II, 6 below). Accompanying examples give transcriptions of (1) the introit trope in its simplest form to the traditional melody (F-Pn lat.8898; 12th-century rituale from Soissons; ex.1); (2) an expanded dialogue with dramatization of the Victime paschali (Pn lat.10482; 14th-century breviary from Paris or Melun; ex.2); (3) the opening of a Visitatio sepulchri with the laments of the Marys, in which the traditional words are modified and a new melody provided (CH-EN 314, from Engelberg; ex.3).
Four liturgical plays celebrating the Resurrection in even more elaborate forms were assembled by Young under the title Ludus paschalis (the nearest manuscript title is Ordo paschalis); they are from Klosterneuburg, Tours, ?Origny-Ste-Benoîte (near St Quentin) and ?Fleury. The longest of these, from Tours, unfortunately incomplete, includes scenes between Pilate and the Roman soldiers, between the Marys and two merchants, the appearance of Christ to the disciples, and the incident of doubting Thomas. The play in the Origny manuscript has rubrics and some portions of the dialogue in French. Seven further plays of the Easter season celebrate the journey to Emmaus (the Peregrinus plays). The feasts of the Ascension and of Whitsuntide were celebrated with dramatic liturgical ceremonies and, often, ingenious machines; they do not, however, seem to have developed as drama, except perhaps in Catalonia (see Donovan).
The most complex of all liturgical plays related to Easter are Passion plays (two in the Carmina burana manuscript, one from Sulmona and one from Monte Cassino; see Sticca, 1970). The most interesting is the longer of the two Passion plays in the Carmina burana. Although normally classed as liturgical drama, this and the other lesser Passions are borderline cases. They are almost entirely in Latin and set to music throughout (there is no such thing as a spoken religious drama in Latin at this period, except for the moral, pseudo-Terentian plays of the 10th-century nun Hrotswitha of Gandersheim), but they have no demonstrable connection with the liturgy. Musically there is a difference too: ‘The number of liturgical pieces incorporated [in the major Carmina burana Passion] is relatively small, and … these are used chiefly as choral introductions to separate scenes’ (Young, 1933, i, 533). Unfortunately the neumes of this play are unheighted in the manuscript; most of the music is therefore locked up in a code that cannot be broken. There are, however, a number of identifiable melodies (see Lipphardt, MGG1), including those of the laments Planctus ante nescia and Flete, fideles anime. These well-known compositions in sequence form had an independent existence which is well attested (ex.4 gives the opening of the melody of Flete, fideles from I-Pc C.56). The planctus is a non-liturgical genre. Its performance in a liturgical context was invariably on Good Friday (Corbin, LaMusicaE), a day on which liturgical plays like those so far described were never presented. Its use here, and frequent occurrence in vernacular Passion plays (see §III, 2(i) below), show the introduction of an important new musical element. It has also led to the question, fascinating but insoluble, as to which came first, Passion play or planctus. (If an origin for the Passion play is to be sought, the most obvious – the traditional liturgical recitation of the Gospel accounts during Holy Week – must apparently be discounted, since until the 15th century the recitation was performed by a single deacon (Young, 1910).)
The other great season of liturgical rejoicing, Christmas, also produced its plays. The dramatic centre of these is again the moment of celebration – the adoration of the shepherds (Officium pastorum) and the adoration of the Magi (Officium stelle). In comparison with those of Easter, few introit tropes survive for the Mass of Christmas. Once again, the documents do not support any theory of gradual evolution or of regular imitation by ‘Christmas playwrights’ of Easter successes. Some 20 Christmas plays can be dated as early as the 11th century: about half are fairly simple dialogues (shepherds and midwives, the latter not usually identified by name); the others are elaborately developed plays about the Magi and Herod (Ordo ad representandum Herodem is the Fleury title), sometimes including a meeting with the shepherds as well, and presented at the end of Matins. Following the Officium stelle of Laon (F-LA 263) in unbroken sequence is the scene of the Slaughter of the Innocents (no music in the manuscript); in other sources the scene is a separate play-unit, as required by its liturgical affiliation – Holy Innocents Day (28 December), nine days before the Magi feast, Epiphany (6 January).
Musically as well as textually the elements of the Christmas plays are analogous to those of Easter: an introit trope using an ‘original’ melody (the Christmas melody usually differs from the Easter one); traditional antiphons (e.g. Venite, adoremus eum, of Epiphany); melodies of apparently secular character and/or origin (see the exchange Salve, pater inclite between Herod and his son in the Fleury play); sequences (e.g. Notker’s Quid tu, virgo – Fleury and Freising); hymns (e.g. Hostis Herodes impie, Salvete, flores martyrum); a formal planctus, Rachel’s lament, the centrepiece of liturgical plays on the Slaughter of the Innocents, in the Freising text entitled Ordo Rachelis. Exx.5 and 6 give a Christmas dialogue headed ‘Quod fit in nocte natalis Domini’, from Padua (I-Pc C.56, a processional); and the dramatic exchange between Herod and Archelaus, from the Fleury Playbook.
The only fully comprehensive Christmas play is that in the Carmina burana; the greater part is notated, but in unheighted neumes without indication of pitch or rhythm. The play contains all the episodes discussed above and opens in addition with an Ordo prophetarum: Augustine sits enthroned with Isaiah, Daniel, the Sibyl and Aaron on his right, and their opponents, the leader of the Synagogue with a group of Jews, on his left. The Procession of the Prophets has already been mentioned (§I, 3 above); it was dramatized many times as a separate Christmas play (see also §III, 2(ii) below).
The plays of Easter and Christmas account numerically for nearly the whole repertory of liturgical drama. The few other plays, however, include some of the most remarkable as individual compositions: on an Old Testament subject, the Play of Daniel from Beauvais; from the New Testament, the Fleury Raising of Lazarus and Conversion of St Paul; of plays dealing with the end of all things, the Provençal Sponsus and the Tegernsee Antichristus; and a group of saints’ plays (miracles), all honouring St Nicholas (Fleury Playbook and elsewhere).
With the plays of the saints should perhaps be classed those that honour the greatest saint of all, the Blessed Virgin, at her four major feasts – the Presentation in the Temple, the Annunciation (then celebrated in December), the Purification (presentation of Jesus in the Temple) and the Assumption. Of these, two Annunciation plays from northern Italy (Padua and Cividale) have musical notation, while Philippe de Mézières’ play for the feast of the Presentation gives elaborate musical directions (§II, 7(ii) below).
Medieval drama, §II: Liturgical drama
The presentation of these dramatic ceremonies and plays was essentially all of a piece with their nature and purpose – liturgical. (The concept of ‘theatre’ is totally anachronistic.) This means that all the subsidiary terms normally used to describe dramatic events are to some extent misleading – ‘stage’, ‘properties’, ‘scenery’, ‘costumes’, even ‘actors’ and ‘audience’; they imply a type of dramatic experience that may be quite alien to the liturgical or near-liturgical occasion. At the same time one must beware thinking that all liturgical plays were the same and that the kind of dramatic mimesis involved was consistent and unchangeable. The more elaborate plays, for example, often ‘seem to have been composed in their extant forms in a spirit of literary and dramatic independence, and to have been attached to the liturgy as appendages rather than as intimate accompaniments of central acts of worship’ (Young, 1933, ii, 399). It is only in these more ambitious presentations, like the Fleury Conversion of St Paul, that the staging plan is implied that was to become standard for the medieval vernacular dramas in their larger forms: the plan of sedes and platea (see fig.6 below). The sedes (‘seats’) or loci (‘houses’, ‘mansions’) were structures or raised platforms identifiable with specific localities – Jerusalem, Saul’s house and so on; the platea (‘place’) was an unlocalized acting area between and in front of the sedes. In §II, 7 below, some remarkable, and remarkably varied, individual plays are discussed; the present section describes general principles based on simpler plays.
The ‘stage’ is the church itself, which is also the ‘auditorium’. The two are not always clearly distinguished from a spatial point of view; a procession moving from station to station creates its own ‘stage’ locality as required. For the Visitatio sepulchri no ‘houses’ are required, unless the sepulchre to which the Marys go to find Jesus can be so called. It should be noted that the Easter sepulchre was not a piece of scenery for a play but a normal part of the Holy Week and Easter ceremonies (fig.2). It could be a temporary wood or canvas structure, or (especially in England) a permanent erection in stone (Brooks, 1921; Sheingorn, 1987). The sepulchre proper might be a chest or coffer placed within the larger structure (the monumentum). But even this degree of representation was not strictly necessary; the altar could, and often did, represent the sepulchre. In Christmas ceremonies and plays the dramatic object of comparable importance to the Easter sepulchre was the crib (presepe). As a focus for popular devotion the crib owes much to St Francis of Assisi, who in 1223 obtained papal permission to erect a crib (with live ox and ass) at Greccio; but it had been in use before this for centuries. Once again, it is not in the narrow sense a stage property; if no crib had been erected, the altar would serve.
A 14th-century Visitatio from Essen (in the Münsterarchiv) with remarkably full rubrics (‘stage directions’ only anachronistically) brings other features to notice, of which one is very unusual: the collegiate church at Essen was for both canons and canonesses, so in their Visitatio the parts of the Marys were taken by women, those of the angels by men. Normally all the roles, male or female, were taken by persons of the same sex. Another characteristic follows traditional practice – the ‘costuming’: the angels wear ecclesiastical vestments and do not ‘pretend’ to be other than clerics (this, however, varies from play to play). A third feature, confirming the absence of full dramatic illusion, is that they are allowed a book to sing from ‘if they do not have it by heart’ and there is light to read it by (Young, 1933, i, p.333). The degree of ‘let’s pretend’ varies, and phrases such as ‘in the likeness of those who are searching’, ‘in imitation of an angel’, ‘in a high [or loud] voice as if rejoicing’, occur in early and late texts and do indicate some move towards dramatic illusion.
The general style of ‘acting’ must also have varied somewhat from place to place, and from century to century. But it is a safe conjecture that it was generally restrained and formal even in the larger plays. One remarkable and fully rubricated text, with music, throws some light on this (Young, i, pl.12): a 14th-century Planctus Marie from Cividale del Friuli (I-CFm CI). Over each phrase of text and music is written a direction to the singer such as: ‘Here shall she turn to the men with arms outstretched’, ‘Here shall she wring her hands’, ‘Here shall she point to Christ with open palms’, ‘Here with head bowed she shall throw herself at the feet of Christ’. The verbal text is highly patterned and elaborately rhetorical; some of the gestures and movements are clearly liturgical – ‘here he strikes his breast’, for example – and it is probable that liturgical gesture and movement is a guiding principle in the play (see Coussemaker, 1860).
The style of singing, the use (or not) of instruments and other matters of musical presentation are considered in §II, 7 below.
Medieval drama, §II: Liturgical drama
The liturgical plays are found in a variety of sources, mostly liturgical service-books (fig.3), but also playbooks, poetic anthologies and miscellanies. The huge majority of Quem queritis dialogues is found in tropers such as the St Martial troper (F-Pn lat.1240) mentioned in §II, 1 above and the Winchester Troper (GB-Ob 775). The extended dialogue Visitatio sepulchri occurs in a wider variety of service-books. The so-called Dublin play, for example, is found in two manuscripts, both processionals (EIRE-Dm Z.4.2.20; GB-Ob Rawl.liturg.d.4); another version, headed ‘In Resurrectione Domini’, comes from a Liber responsalis in the monastery of Einsiedeln, Switzerland (CH-E 300), where, however, it is not liturgically placed. The tendency to detach the more elaborate dialogues and plays from their liturgical context is most marked in the case of three highly individual manuscripts. The first and most famous is the Carmina burana manuscript from the monastery of Benediktbeuern (D-Mbs 4660), which contains among many remarkable items a fragmentary play, De rege Egipti, a Ludus paschalis, two Passion plays, a Peregrinus and an elaborate Christmas play. The second manuscript, also well known, can be claimed as the most truly ‘dramatic’ of all the sources: the Fleury Playbook (F-O 201). The manuscript itself is a large 13th-century religious miscellany; but in the midst of it are inserted four gatherings containing ten plays – the first playbook of its kind. The third manuscript is that rare thing in medieval times, a book to which an author’s name can be attached: that of Hilarius, a wandering scholar and pupil of Abelard. His book (F-Pn lat.11331, 12th century) contains poems, verse letters and three plays, but without musical notation. Sometimes even a quite elaborate play is substantially the same in several sources. Such is the case with the Officium stelle of Rouen (F-Pn lat.904, with music, Pn lat.1213, R 222, R 382, R 384). But generally the more elaborate the play, the less likely this is to occur.
The entire, or partial, absence of musical notation from sources of liturgical plays does not mean that they were not sung. Nor does the use of the Latin verb dicere in rubrics, instead of cantare, imply the spoken word, since both verbs are used, apparently interchangeably, in the texts of plays with music throughout and also in liturgical books. (The sources of the liturgical drama are listed comprehensively by Lipphardt in ‘Liturgische Dramen’, MGG1, where a distinguishing asterisk is given to those that contain music. The sources are listed there by provenance or present location but without shelf-marks, for which Young or Smoldon (1980) must be consulted; see also Lipphardt, 1975.)
Medieval drama, §II: Liturgical drama
Medieval church plays are written in a great variety of notations corresponding to the notations of other melodic music of the period c900–c1500. In the case of plays closely attached to the liturgy of Christmas or Easter (i.e. the huge majority of surviving musical texts), the notation of the play is identical to that of the liturgical context and presents the same difficulties. Thus the 10th-century St Gallen version of the Quem queritis is in Franco-German unheighted neumes; the St Martial (ex.7) in Aquitanian with some indication of comparative pitch by heightening. The clarification of pitch is carried one stage further in, for example, a troper from Ravenna (I-MOd O.1.17, 11th–12th century), in which the north Italian neumes are almost precisely heighted by the use of a single line (with faint subsidiaries), with F clef (see fig.1 above). Two lines, usually F and one other, are given to help the singer in a gradual-troper from Piacenza (I-PCd 65, 11th–12th century). Finally (though the sequence is not neatly chronological), most of the longer plays, except those in the Carmina burana manuscript, are written in a notation that clearly indicates pitches on a four-line staff; the Fleury Playbook is written in the neumes characteristic of northern France in the 12th century (see fig.4); they, like the neumes of Gregorian chant in the same period, are beginning to approximate to the now familiar square shapes. These are more evident still in the Ludus paschalis of Origny-Ste-Benoîte (F-SQ 86). A style of notation slightly less liturgical in its associations is found in the early 13th-century manuscript GB-Lbl Eg.2615 (containing the Play of Daniel; see fig.5); but even there the notation is nearer to that of the liturgical monophonic than to that of the polyphonic pieces in the same manuscript (the characteristic canted punctum, a rhomboid form, is much used in both sections).
The satisfactory transcription of the liturgical drama is bedevilled not only by the problem of pitch but also by the other problem that besets the study of early monody in general – that of rhythm. It presents itself in two forms: briefly, how should the liturgical chants and melodic passages modelled freely on them be interpreted, and how should melodies of a more secular character be interpreted? In answer to the first question, there is no reason to think that in their somewhat enlarged and freer context the liturgical chants in any way changed their style. If the chant was normally sung rhythmically in a modified equal-note style, then certainly it was so sung in a dramatic setting. On the other hand, melodies such as Astra tenenti, cunctipotenti or Jubilemus regi nostro, magno ac potenti (from the Play of Daniel) with their strongly accentual Latin verse texts seem to invite the metrical interpretation that most editors give them – triple in the first case (ex.8) and duple or triple in the second (ex.9). More complicated melodies, such as the planctus of Rachel in the Fleury Play of the Innocents, need, as do other melismatic songs (e.g. of the troubadours and trouvères), more flexible treatment. There is no agreed style for the transcription and editing of liturgical plays. Weakland (1961) proposed, and in his edition of the Play of Daniel exemplified, the above distinction between unmeasured liturgical and metricalized ‘secular’ melody. Tintori and Monterosso (1958) rendered the whole text of the Fleury Playbook according to the principles of pre-Franconian, modal notation. Krieg (1956) adopted a more flexible but continuously modal interpretation for the whole of the Tours Easter play, prose and verse passages alike. The solution adopted by Coussemaker (1860) of transcribing the music of the plays into traditional Gregorian square notation is non-committal but practical, as is the modern equivalent of unmeasured note heads. Each play presents its individual problems; but it seems both unhistorical and unmusical not to recognize in many plays the co-existence of different melodic styles, whose proper interpretation is bound up with that of Gregorian chant in the Middle Ages and of other monophonic music (in Latin and in the vernaculars).
Medieval drama, §II: Liturgical drama
The way in which both the simplest and the more complex liturgical plays incorporate material direct from the seasonal liturgy has already been briefly described (§II, 2 above). However, research is still needed on the sources of the melodies used in the plays. A common extension, for instance, to the basic Quem queritis dialogue consists of the trope Alleluia, Resurrexit Dominus, hodie resurrexit leo fortis, Christus, filius Dei (e.g. in F-APT 4). As this has different music from the antiphon Alleluia, Resurrexit Dominus (Smoldon, 1980), some confusion has arisen in tracing the sources of the Fleury and Rouen plays, which use this trope.
The analysis of the musical style and structure of these melodies is also not far advanced. The assimilation round the newly composed basic dialogues of Easter and Christmas of known liturgical or paraliturgical material (e.g. sequences) from varied contexts posed problems of dramatic and of musical unity. The musical problem resolves itself into various related questions. How was the deviser or arranger (the words ‘composer’ and ‘playwright’ are best avoided) to achieve a consistent musical style? What devices of melodic repetition (sequence, ‘rhyme’, motif) were admissible? How could modal congruity, tonal unity, be achieved? What dramatic criteria did the musician have to satisfy?
A consistent musical style was achieved, no doubt almost unconsciously, by the use of the idiom of Gregorian chant. In the case of the simplest dramatic ceremonies, mere dialogue tropes, the whole intention of the arranger was in any case liturgical. The fact that the musical phraseology of the Quem queritis itself is analogous to that of other liturgical melodies should cause no surprise. From Brandel (1966/R) it appears that the closest analogy is that of the Whitsuntide antiphon Paraclitus autem (LU, 900); the fact that liturgically the two are not at all closely connected makes it likely that the borrowing was unconscious. Brandel further noted that the chant of the Marys as they approach the sepulchre, ‘Ad monumentum venimus gementes’ (see ex.3 above), has a close parallel in Gloria XIII (LU, 51, ‘Et in terra’) and that its main melodic marking (rising 3rd superimposed on rising 5th) occurs appropriately in the Easter Tuesday alleluia verse Surrexit dominus de sepulchro (LU, 790; exx.10 and 11). In his thorough study of the 13th-century Tours Ludus paschalis Krieg (1956) showed the extent of the melodic debt in unidentified chants, by approaching the problem from the opposite angle. The parts of the liturgy most familiar to the medieval singer were the Ordinary of the Mass and the Requiem Mass. Musical thoughts were naturally taken from these as well as from the chants of the most important season of the Christian year – Passiontide and Easter. One of the haunting cadences of the Easter sequence Victime paschali mentioned above, ‘quid vidisti in via?’ (C–F–E–D–E–C–D), recurs over 15 times in the Tours play; the descending phrase ‘Christus innocens patris’ (A–G–A–G–F–E–C) ten or eleven times; ‘gloriam vidi resurgentis’ (G–F–G–A–G–F–G–F–E–D) again more than 15. Phrases from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the Gloria, Sanctus and Benedictus of Mass I (in tempore paschali) and the Popule meus are also taken from the Lent and Easter liturgies; and the sequence Dies irae, the responsory Libera me, Domine, and Fac eas, Domine (from the offertory Domine Jesu Christe) from the Requiem Mass (Krieg, 1956). The arranger-composer of a play such as this from Tours must have been a cleric who lived this music throughout the year in a singing community. He put it together (‘com-posed’ it) with intellectual control certainly, but out of a teeming hoard of deeply known and only half-consciously transmuted material.
However,
the presence in a play of a large number of known liturgical melodies and the
widespread use of innumerable known motifs to form ‘new’ melodies do not in
themselves bring about musical unity in a continuous composition. The problem
of tonal, or more specifically modal, unity has to be solved. The subtle
adjustments, for example, demanded by the shift of the Christmas dialogue from
the beginning of Mass to the end of Matins were analysed by Lipphardt (MGG1,
col.1022). In a play as long as the Tours Ludus paschalis the problem is
on a bigger scale. In this play the predominant mode is the D mode; but the
quite long scene in which the Marys buy spices from the merchant is entirely in
the F mode (or, more exactly, as it requires B
s, in the transposed C mode). There may be a
deliberate choice here, since the musical content of the scene is a single
melody repeated some ten times (ex.12). The D mode predominates also in the Fleury Visitatio
sepulchri; but here a big shift occurs in the middle of the play for the
scene in the garden, starting with the angel’s question ‘Mulier quid ploras?’.
This is in the E mode and opens a series of ‘speeches’ all in this mode. At the
end of the series, when the linen cloths are placed on the altar, there is a
brief interlude of six phrases oscillating between finals on F and G (as the
Marys celebrate the Resurrection) and two familiar antiphons [Nolite timere
vos;] ite nunciate, on E, and the final triumphant Resurrexit
hodie Dominus, leo fortis Christus filius Dei, on D. More needs to be known
about the emotional effects associated with different modes before the precise
intention behind these changes can be defined. Their nature at least is clear.
Lipphardt (1963), from a modal analysis of the Le Mans Versus ad faciendum Herodem,
concluded that ‘the musical technique which can here be characterized as
adaptation is one that has been many times described – it is that of the psalm
“differences” [the variant endings which ensure smooth transitions between
psalm and antiphon] and it is in keeping with the liturgical character of the
play’ (see Psalm, §II).
Analysis of the musical structure of the plays has to take two other aspects into account: the frequent use of what may be called ‘narrative melody’, and the presence of contrasting material (melodies not modelled on plainchant). The first feature is most evident in such a play as the Fleury Tres filie, a ‘miracle’ of St Nicholas. The story is not lacking in dramatic possibilities; it tells how the saint ‘by timely gifts of gold to an indigent father, rescues the three daughters from careers of prostitution’ (Young, 1933, ii, 311). Yet it is sung throughout almost entirely to the same melody. This could be thought a special technique for a special purpose, were it not that, as already seen, episodes in fully dramatic and musically developed liturgical plays, such as those from Tours, Origny-Ste-Benoîte and Fleury, could be presented in a similarly stylized way – for example the lively merchant scene in the Origny Ludus paschalis, which uses one tune 16 times (ex.13). Possibly this was the sort of melody to which narrative poems (chansons de geste and saints’ lives) were sung. There are certain obvious similarities between it and the melody of the Tours merchant scene (see ex.12 above). Each tune hovers around the major 3rd or 4th above the final, making only brief flights above this, and has an impersonal, yet malleable, character analogous to, though musically distinct from, psalm tones.
The presence of contrasting (i.e. non-liturgical) material has been most convincingly demonstrated in the case of the planctus. ‘In the melodies of [the developed Easter plays] the different music worlds of the Middle Ages are … harmoniously juxtaposed. In the figure of Mary they are indeed knit together into the unity of a dramatic action’ (Lipphardt, 1948). One mark of ‘secular’ influence in the planctus is the characteristic fall of a 5th as at the phrase ‘Sed eamus’ in ex.3) above. Such a fall is also found, however, in the very same D mode, in the liturgical antiphon Ad monumentum venimus (see above). Its secular nature is more apparent when it occurs in the C or G modes, as in Rachel’s lament from the Fleury Slaughter of the Innocents (ex.14..\Frames/F922864.html: ‘Heu! teneri partus’). This progression has something in common with, for instance, melodies in one of the most popular planctus of the period, the Planctus ante nescia; see, for example, the phrase ‘Reddite mestissime’ (ex.15). The tradition of the planctus was one that came ready-made, or ready at least for adaptation, to the arrangers of the more complex liturgical plays and provided a corpus of melody different from, but assimilable to, Gregorian chant.
Medieval drama, §II: Liturgical drama
These linked aspects will be discussed with special reference to a few plays of marked individuality which have received less than their due above. The problem of musical interpretation cannot be considered in isolation from other aspects, though attempts to do so have been common enough. The whole style and meaning of the liturgical drama depend on non-realistic conventions of staging, properties and costumes, on a relationship unfamiliar in modern times between actors and ‘audience’ (?congregation, ?bystanders – populus is the neutral term most frequent in the texts), on a style of acting (movement and gesture) and doubtless of singing far removed from modern styles. Music is not only an inseparable part of this complex but a major one – principally in the form of song, but also as the music of instruments. The questions which need to be considered concern music and character, music and ‘atmosphere’, music as expression and music as symbol, an iconography in sound.
(ii) Mézières’ ‘Presentation’.
(iv) Fleury ‘Play of the Innocents’.
Medieval drama, §II, 7: Liturgical drama: Interpretation and performance
This play (in I-Pc CI, 13th century) is a tellingly simple dramatic ceremony which, although of a rare genre, is thoroughly typical in its general style (see Vecchi, 1954). It took place on the day of the feast ‘after dinner’, as an addition to the authorized liturgy, not as a dramatization of part of it. It opens with a procession of the main characters from sacristy to church. It uses expected liturgical material – the epistle for the day (called the ‘prophecy’), the gospel (Missus est angelus Gabriel), antiphons (Ave Maria, gratia plena, Ecce ancilla domini, Benedicta tu in mulieribus etc.). It ends with an alternatim performance of the Magnificat for choir and organ.
The central action of the play is symbolic: the dove, immemorial symbol of the Holy Spirit, plunges from the roof of the church and is received by Mary under her cloak. This symbolic use of ‘properties’ is paralleled by a symbolic use of space (Gabriel comes from the choir, the ‘heavenly’ part of the church, to visit Mary in the nave, the ‘earthly’ region), a symbolic time (Mary’s journey to Elizabeth’s house takes only a few seconds), and symbolic gesture (Mary is to stand and welcome the dove with, literally, ‘open arms’). This dramatic style may be summed up not as realism but as realization. The deviser of such a ceremony aimed not to reconstruct a dimly grasped historical event but to honour the Virgin by realizing, making real, a truth about her in the most vivid terms available. His most vivid terms were not, even in drama, naturalistic and causal, a copy of everyday life, but typological and symbolic.
The most important points to be made about the function of the music are negative. First, the music has nothing to do with the presentation of character in the sense of individual personality. Gabriel, the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth all sing in the same style – the style of singing plainchant in 13th-century Padua, whatever that may have been. Moreover, the two principal women’s parts were sung, as nearly always, by grown men. Their musical utterances are no more personal than their formal gestures. Working powerfully against any concept of musical ‘personality’ for the singers is the very fact that the music for the play is a potpourri of familiar chants, associated for the congregation with a liturgical solemnity and communal rejoicing, not with the expression of individual feeling. A second negative point is that the music is not concerned with creating or reinforcing ‘atmosphere’ – not in the sense that, for instance, Debussy could create through music the sunless atmosphere of underground caves in Act 3 of Pelléas et Mélisande. There is, of course, a legitimate sense in which the music of the Padua play ‘creates an atmosphere’ – one of restraint and dignity, a liturgical atmosphere, helping to give the play a significance beyond the merely temporal and occasional. What is certain, however, is that in this and other small-scale plays the atmosphere is not peculiar to the play – it is an intensification of the liturgical experience proper to the feast.
Medieval drama, §II, 7: Liturgical drama: Interpretation and performance
One noticeable feature of the Padua play and of the great majority of liturgical plays is the complete absence of any reference to the playing of instruments. Since the method of staging the plays is described very fully in some instances, this negative evidence must be given weight. A remarkable ordo, however, written by the French nobleman Philippe de Mézières (F-Pn lat.17330), prescribing in the fullest detail for his Festum Presentationis Beate Marie Virginis, is one of the few which do mention instrumental music. It helps to clarify the problem. (For a complete text of Mézières’ ordo see Coleman, 1981.)
This ambitiously conceived liturgical ceremony, which has impersonation, action, dialogue and all the usual features of a play, was composed for the introduction into the Western Church of the feast of the Presentation (Avignon, 1372); it had the approval of the pope and the ecclesiastical hierarchy at Avignon, a fact which gives the ordo unusual authority. The ceremony is based on an apocryphal story; its climax comes when Mary, impersonated by a ‘very beautiful little girl’ three or four years old, climbs the Temple steps to the altar and is presented by her parents, Joachim and Anna, to the bishop, who receives her ‘in the person of God the Father’. Structurally the play is in three parts (Procession, Praises [Laudes Marie] and Presentation); it is followed without a break by the Mass (during which Mary sits on a special platform), by a short civic procession and by a banquet. There is a great deal of singing (the ordo does not provide notated melodies) of the usual kind. And in addition ‘two young men who shall play sweet [?soft] instruments’ are named in the cast and frequently referred to in the rubrics as pulsatores. Their instruments are never specified; the verb ‘pulsare’ was used in medieval Latin for the playing of drums, trumpets, plucked instruments and, with great frequency, bells. Perhaps the young men played more than one kind of instrument; this seems likely, since their main function was the usual function of instrumental musicians – to accompany movement. They played processional, ‘escort’ music, as the characters went from place to place. For this loud instruments must have been required. But when they played for an angel singing ‘some song in the style of a rondellus … in the vernacular’, string music would have been more appropriate. The musicians were also required to quieten the populace down after the expulsion of the character Synagogue from the church, which was expected to cause noisy laughter.
There are one or two points of particular interest. The instrumental music was not, except in the unusual case of the devotional vernacular song, used to support singing; the liturgical items were apparently unaccompanied. Only two instrumentalists were employed for a dramatic ceremony of great magnificence, although all the resources of the papal court were presumably available. The musicians are specifically required to be silent during the Presentation scene itself, the liturgical climax; and they retire altogether, escorting the main actors, before the introit of the Mass is sung. From the limited use of musical instruments on such a grand occasion, it can perhaps be inferred that the liturgical drama as a whole did not often have occasion to employ them. The only frequent known exceptions are organs and bells.
Medieval drama, §II, 7: Liturgical drama: Interpretation and performance
There is, however, another play, of equal though different magnificence, the celebrated early 13th-century Beauvais Play of Daniel (GB-Lbl Eg.2615; see fig.5 above) which must be taken into consideration; this play, the opening lines state, was devised by the young people (juventus: ?students of the cathedral school) of Beauvais ‘in honour of Christ’. In fact, it celebrates Christmas; at the end an angel ‘shall suddenly cry out “Natus est Christus”’. Daniel was chosen as the subject not out of a historical whim but because he was a prophet of Christ’s coming. The play tells the familiar Bible story (Daniel v.1ff).
There are at least 50 distinct melodies in the play, unrepeated and untraced in other sources. These are largely syllabic and seem to fit naturally into the patterns created by the accentual Latin verses. One or two pieces are in a florid plainchant style, but only the last item, the Christmas hymn Nuntium vobis fero, can be identified liturgically. These facts alone make it unique.
Relevant to the problem of instrumental music is the large number of processional items, all with text: ‘conductus regine’; ‘conductus Danielis venientis ad regem’; ‘conductus referentium vasa ante Danielem’ and so on. But only one rubric in the whole play specifically mentions instrumental music; it announces the coming of Darius who will kill Belshazzar and seize his throne – ‘At once King Darius shall appear with his princes, and the cythariste and princes shall proceed before him singing [psallentes] these words’. The term ‘cythariste’ suggests that an element of scriptural stylization, based on Old Testament writings, can creep even into stage directions. The reference in the poetic text itself is even more stylized: ‘let drums resound; let the harp players pluck their strings; let the musicians’ instruments sound his praises’. Nevertheless, there is no reason to believe that the students of Beauvais were more restrained than Philippe de Mézières; the nature of the play, depicting the glory and the fall of kings, indeed calls for fanfares and the like. But neither text nor liturgical tradition supports the idea of lavish and continuous musical accompaniment. The only other play of comparable magnitude on a comparable subject, the 12th-century Tegernsee Antichristus (D-Mbs lat.19411), is full of regal characters, but instrumental effects are nowhere specified. It is easy to be misled by the appeal of colourful modern productions of such plays.
Among the numerous rubrics of the Play of Daniel are two that raise a further large problem of interpretation – that of the actor’s proper singing style. The rubrics are ‘stupefactus clamabit’ and ‘dicens lacrimabiliter’. Were Belshazzar’s astonishment and Darius’s grief to appear in their voices? It certainly seems so. But these are the only stylistic suggestions in 392 lines of text. Some plays, however, are more explicit. The common rubrics ‘alta voce’, ‘mediocri voce’ and ‘humili voce’ are found also in the liturgy proper, referring rather to loudness or pitch than to style. But other rubrics seem to require a distinct emotional colouring to be given to the chant in performance. Examples taken from texts of the Visitatio sepulchri alone are: ‘mediocri voce dulcisone’ (‘in a medium voice, sweetly’); ‘submissa voce quasi in aurem dicentes’ (‘in a low voice as if speaking into [his] ear’); ‘voce sonora’ (‘in a resonant voice’); ‘cantantes multum suppressa voce (? ‘in a very hushed voice’); ‘alte vociferantes’ (‘shouting out loud’); ‘devote … aliquantulum remisse’ (‘with devotion and rather gently’). Other adjectives and adverbs applied to singing are simplex, blande, lenis, auctorabilis, alacris, querulus, lentus, flebilis and moderatus et admodum gravis. This aspect of the plays is insufficiently studied; but there appears to be an unexpected dimension of psychological realism here. The problem is how the implications of these rubrics can be squared with other indications in the plays of formality, impersonality and emotional restraint.
Medieval drama, §II, 7: Liturgical drama: Interpretation and performance
Problems of interpretation and performance must be solved separately for each individual play. But to formulate true generalizations about the function of music in liturgical drama, plays more typical than the Play of Daniel and Antichristus must be chosen for analysis. A play that sums up the central traditions of liturgical drama is The Slaughter of the Innocents from the Fleury Playbook (see fig.4 above). It opens with the Innocents (the choristers of the choir) processing through the church singing O quam gloriosum est regnum (antiphon of Vespers, Vigil of All Saints). Then ‘a lamb, suddenly appearing, bearing a cross, shall go before them … and they following sing, “Emitte agnum, Domine”’ (antiphon of Lauds, second Sunday before Christmas). This procession continues during the angel’s warning to Joseph, Herod’s attempted suicide on hearing the news of the escape of the Magi, and his command for the slaying of the children. As the slayers approach, the Innocents salute the lamb once more, ‘Salve, Agnus Dei’. The distraught mothers are allowed a prayer of five words for mercy. Immediately an angel appears and exhorts the slain children to rise and cry out. Dead on the ground, they sing a sentence from a responsory of Matins of Innocents’ Day, ‘Quare non defendis sanguinem nostrum, Deus noster?’ (‘Why dost thou not defend our blood, O our Lord?’). They continue to lie prostrate during the long fourfold lament of Rachel, but rise to their feet when the angel sings the antiphon ‘Sinite parvulos’ (‘Suffer the little children’, antiphon of Lauds of Innocents’ Day) and process to the choir, praising Christ in the words of the sequence Festa Christi. Archelaus succeeds Herod as king (in dumb-show), the angel summons the holy family back to Galilee, Joseph sings Gaude, gaude (antiphon of the Assumption of the BVM), and the play ends with the Te Deum.
This brief summary cannot do justice to the skill with which the deviser has blended three planes of reality – a traditional historical story (entirely scriptural), a liturgical celebration (for the feast of the Holy Innocents) and a planctus of typological significance (Rachel is the Old Testament type of the mourning mother; Jeremiah xxxi.15). But it demonstrates the typically non-realistic character of the play. The slaughtered children are not little Jewish two-year-olds but the Innocents of Revelation xiv.1ff, the 144,000 virgins who follow the lamb, singing in procession in the heavenly city. When they are swiftly and decorously slaughtered, they are not so dead that they cannot continue to sing.
The music of the play, like the text, is a mosaic of passages from the service-books: at least ten separate liturgical chants are quoted from half a dozen different services; they are mostly traditional antiphons. Rachel’s lament excepted, the music was borrowed or adapted from, or composed in imitation of, liturgical plainchant. The measure and restraint of the liturgical utterances are exemplified in the angel’s exhortation to the slain children to be patient until the time appointed, ‘Adhuc sustinete modicum tempus’ (see ex.14 above); there is nothing more violent in this G mode melody than one rising triad, and almost all movement is by step. Rachel’s lament, on the other hand, belongs to the musical tradition of the planctus, with roots in secular ceremonial and affinities to courtly song; its words are highly emotional and rhetorical: ‘Alas, delicate children, whose torn limbs we see! Alas, sweet sons, your throats cut in a single fit of rage’. The melody is correspondingly less restrained and more patterned than plainchant. Various features are notable: the melismatic exclamations of grief, the sequential setting of ‘Heu! heu! heu!’, the recurrence of musical ‘rhyme’ at the end of each hexameter, and the occasional bold melodic jumps. The transition from this comparatively extroverted, emotional style back to authentic liturgical chant at the end of the play is beautifully accomplished by the antiphon that Rachel sings as she falls on the bodies of the children, Anxiatus est in me spiritus meus (antiphon of Lauds of Good Friday).
The contribution of music to the dramatic experience can be summed up as follows (see Stevens, 1968). First, the composition is singularly unified in tone. There is variety in the music, not only between the planctus and plainchant (traditional or newly composed) but also, within both of these, between a melismatic and a syllabic style (see below exx.18 and 20). The final impression, however, is of unity. Second, the use of known chant has what might be called an ‘iconographic’ power. Through the psalm-antiphon Anxiatus est the grief of Rachel, already generalized through the symbolism of her character, is identified with the sorrows of the psalmist and (by recalling the liturgy of Good Friday) with the sufferings of Christ himself. Melodies sung at memorable moments of the church year bring a wealth of reference and meaning to the drama. Finally, the liturgical music proper has a direct emotional effect in contrast to the human suffering conveyed in the central scene of Rachel. Negatively, in its grave restraint and complete lack of flamboyant emotion, it prevents the listener becoming too involved in the human situation for itself. Positively, it lifts him or her with its serene movement above temporal anxieties into that other world, beyond time, the truths of which the liturgical drama was created to celebrate.
1. Introduction and presentation.
2. Early and miscellaneous plays.
Medieval drama, §III: Vernacular drama
A broad division between vernacular, spoken plays and Latin, sung plays is obvious and necessary (see §I above); and to postulate two traditions of medieval religious drama is a necessary corrective to the old one-line evolutionary theory. But it would be wrong to suggest that these roughly parallel lines could never meet. There are a number of plays, especially in German (the Marienklagen; see §III, 2(i) below), the Innsbruck Osterspiel and so on (see §III, 3(iii) below), but also in other vernaculars (e.g. the ‘Bodleian’ Burial and Resurrection; see §III, 3(i) below), for which the term ‘vernacular liturgical drama’ is appropriate. The Marienklagen, at least, and the English Burial and Resurrection seem relatively unaffected by the more obviously secular elements, sometimes less so than some Latin ‘liturgical’ dramas. Above all, one must bear in mind the extraordinary variety of vernacular drama in every European country (even though the surviving sources may not do justice to it), compared with which the Latin ecclesiastical drama is almost monolithic. Moreover, it was not entirely a religious drama (see §III, 2(iii) below) even if most of the plays that survive are religious.
Despite this variety, certain general propositions about the staging of medieval vernacular plays hold true: the presentation of time and place was non-naturalistic; ‘scenery’ was a matter of a few ‘houses’ (sedes, lieux etc.) and properties were of an emblematic kind (an arch to represent a temple, a tree to represent a garden etc.); costume was generally more naturalistic and ‘in character’ than in the liturgical plays, but contemporary and not historical (Annas and Caiaphas were dressed as medieval bishops, not as Jewish priests of the pre-Christian era); the great majority of performances took place out of doors by daylight, and the audience was far less insulated from the actors than it is in a modern theatre with footlights and spotlights. In short, the medieval vernacular drama was part-formal, part-naturalistic, but always contemporary.
Most medieval plays are rather sparsely provided with directions for their performance. For instance, it is not known where and when, let alone how, the Sponsus (§III, 2(ii) below) was performed. The picture has to be built up from one or two well-documented plays, such as the Play of Adam (§III, 2(ii) below) and from the voluminous but disconnected information that can be pieced together from texts and archives about the major forms of religious drama.
As in liturgical drama the basic means of presentation for all forms is an unlocalized acting area, or ‘place’ (Lat. platea; Fr. place), around which, or behind, or in which, are a number of localized ‘houses’, ‘scaffolds’ or ‘pageants’ (Lat. sedes; Fr. lieux, estages, sièges: fig.6). The ‘houses’ sometimes completely surrounded the ‘place’ (diagrams survive for the Cornish Ordinalia, for the Cornish Life of Meriasek and for the morality The Castle of Perseverance, fig.7); on other occasions a half-circle was perhaps set up (the Anglo-Norman La seinte resureccion, on the basis of a detailed prologue; the miniature by Jean Fouquet of a play on the martyrdom of St Apollonia (fig.8; see Southern, 1957, 2/1975)). In so far as there was a special ‘house’ for musicians, it was likely to be God’s ‘house’ (i.e. heaven).
The presentation of the English mystery cycles has been a matter of debate. At one time it was thought that processional performance on waggons, each playlet or scene being acted in turn at a large number of stopping-places, was the normal mode. It is now recognized that place-and-scaffold staging, as shown by the N-Town plays’ elaborate stage directions and by the plans for performances of certain English and Cornish plays ‘in the round’, was a more common staging-mode, while some multi-day continental Passion plays were performed in a market-place, as at Lucerne. Nevertheless, the Records of Early English Drama project (REED, 1979–) has shown that, contrary to the belief of Nelson (1974) and others, some cities did use the processional mode – York, Chester, Coventry, Norwich, Beverley and Newcastle upon Tyne among them. Such staging is now recognized as being closely related to the waggons and other movable platforms still used for processions and tableaux on the Continent. The debate continues, however, about the numbers of plays performed and stations played at in late medieval performances at York and elsewhere.
General types of medieval dramatic activity and their presentation were described at length by Wickham (1959–72, 2/1980–81); the staging of the Towneley plays by Rose (1961/R); The Castle of Perseverance by Southern (1957, 2/1975); the staging of several individual French plays by Axton (Axton and Stevens, 1971); the French mystères by Cohen (1906, 3/1951); the German plays by Michael (1963); and a huge amount of information about dramatic representations in Spain was collected by Shergold (1967). For an overview of staging methods and techniques see Meredith and Tailby (1983). In the last 20 years scholars have tended to work on individual plays: see, for instance, essays in Dutka, ed. (1979); Lumiansky and Mills (1983); Mills, ed. (1985); Briscoe and Coldewey, eds. (1989); and various issues of Medieval English Theatre (1979–). The thesis that the visual arts (ivories, carvings, stone-bosses) depict properties, costumes and décor was most persuasively argued and illustrated by Hildburgh (1949) and Anderson (1963). This work has been continued in Davidson’s series Early Drama, Art, and Music (EDAM, 1977–), for instance.
Medieval drama, §III: Vernacular drama
(i) Complaints of the BVM: ‘Marienklagen’.
(ii) ‘Sponsus’, the ‘Play of Adam’, ‘St Agnes’ and the Shrewsbury fragments.
Medieval drama, §III, 2: Vernacular drama: Early and miscellaneous plays
The complaint of Mary is a unique form of the Passion play and one in which music plays a prominent part. The planctus of the Blessed Virgin was sung beneath the crucifix of many German and north Italian churches on Good Friday. The event was extra-liturgical and had therefore no fixed time, but often nevertheless took place during the Office itself (Corbin, 1960). Some 50 Marienklagen survive in German manuscripts; they differ in extent and in detail but are essentially identical, even in their musical substance. There is no full-length musical study of the Marienklagen. Essential information is found in basic articles by Lipphardt (1932; 1933; 1934; 1948), in editions (especially Kühl, 1898), and in the studies of Schönbach (1874), Wechssler on Romance vernacular ‘complaints’ (1893), Corbin (1960) and Sticca (1984, Eng. trans., 1988).
Two Marienklagen, one from Munich and one from Bordesholm, Lower Saxony, are of special interest. The Munich text (D-Mbs Cgm 716) shows the vernacular ‘lament’ emerging, as it were, from the Latin planctus, in this case from the best known of all, the Planctus ante nescia; here it occurs in its simplest form, a monologue chanted by the Virgin. The Bordesholm text, on the other hand, is almost 900 lines long, but still almost entirely sung, and has elaborate directions for performance. Again, no orderly chronological development can be inferred; the ‘simple’ Munich text dates from the 15th century. The remaining sources range between these extremes of dramatic monologue and extended Passion play. The Munich text starts with the words and melody of the Planctus ante nescia and later quotes from another famous sequence, Flete, fideles; the rest of the text is in German, with very few rubrics (e.g. ‘Quum vadit ad crucem’: ‘he advances towards the cross’). Towards the end the melody departs entirely from its model and from any liturgical pattern, becoming extremely animated and florid, with extended melodic exclamations. ‘The supposition that here we have to do with common courtly formulae of the chivalric Totenklage [death lament] is confirmed by the introduction of the Nibelung strophe as the highest expression of lamentation in the Trier Marienklage’ (Lipphardt, MGG1; Geering, 1949). Such a melody as that shown in ex.16 would be in the sharpest contrast to its Good Friday liturgical context. Lipphardt and Corbin have both emphasized the non-liturgical spirit of the planctus tradition; it is most clearly evinced in these vernacular ‘complaints’.
The Bordesholm Marienklage shows how wide the range of musical material could be. There are liturgical chants, especially from Holy Week (the hymn Crux fidelis; the responsory Tenebrae factae sunt, at the end; the antiphon Anxiatus est, occurring in seven other Marienklagen, at the beginning). There are also known melodies from the repertory of Minnesang, for example Neidhart von Reuental’s May hat wunniglich entsprossen and Walther von der Vogelweide’s Kreuzfahrerweise (Abert, 1948). And there may be additional echoes of the chivalric Totenklage.
There is a further interest in the Bordesholm manuscript, not in the text itself but in a most unusual preface:
Here begins the most devout complaint of the most Blessed Virgin Mary with the most pitiful and most devout music [cum misericordissima et devotissima nota]: the Blessed Virgin delivers this complaint most devoutly, with the assistance of four devout persons. It takes place on Good Friday before dinner, in the church in front of the choir on a slightly raised platform – or outside the church if the weather is good. This complaint is not a stage play [ludus] nor a sport [ludibrium] but indeed a complaint and a lamentation; it depicts the deep shared sorrow [compassio] of Mary, glorious Virgin. When it is done by good and sincere men … it truly arouses the bystanders to genuine tears and compassion … This complaint can easily be performed in two and a half hours. Everything that these five persons have to do shall be done without haste and without undue delay, in good modest fashion. The man who takes the part of Christ is a devout priest [devotus sacerdos]; Mary is a young man [juvenis]; John the Evangelist, a priest; Mary Magdalen and the mother of John, young men.
The preface speaks for itself, but two points are particularly worth noting: the insistence that the play is neither ludus nor ludibrium, that it transcends the categories of fiction and of entertainment and that it is true; and the evident paradox of presenting a highly emotional and deliberately emotive situation in a restrained and measured manner. This clearly raises problems of musical interpretation relating not only to the Marienklagen but also to the religious drama as a whole. (There is no easy translation for juvenis. As it can imply an unbroken voice or an adolescent, it should perhaps be rendered ‘youth’ rather than ‘young man’ with its implication of post-pubertal status.)
Medieval drama, §III, 2: Vernacular drama: Early and miscellaneous plays
A number of isolated religious plays survive from the Middle Ages that do not belong either to the liturgical drama or to the main traditions of vernacular drama. Like the Marienklagen and, indeed, many German Passion plays, they mingle Latin and vernacular and give music an important place. They differ widely in date and in general style.
The first, Sponsus (see §II, 1 above), comes from a well-known late 11th-century manuscript of St Martial (F-Pn lat.1139); it is just under 100 lines long. The play dramatizes in a mixture of Latin and Provençal the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew xxv.1–13) and ends with the coming of the bridegroom (sponsus). The play differs from the parable in putting more emphasis on the distress of the foolish and less on the joy of the wise; in introducing new characters – the angel Gabriel, demones (the earliest devils of medieval drama) and merchants, who refuse to sell oil to the foolish; and in being more radically an allegory of advent and judgment (Christ is bridegroom and judge; heaven is the marriage feast).
Although Sponsus is often classed as a liturgical play, the text ‘bears no evidence of attachment to the liturgy, or having developed from liturgical pieces’, or of having been performed in church (Young, 1933, ii, 361). Chailley (1960), on palaeographical, metrical, musical, thematic (literary) and other grounds, believed it to belong with the prophet play which follows it in the manuscript. Advent seems to be its proper season (see, further, Thomas, 1951). The standard scholarly editions (with music) are by Thomas (1951) and Avalle and Monterosso (1965); there is a practical edition, by Smoldon (1972), with comments on the musical notation.
Musically, also, Sponsus has nothing in common with other Latin church plays: it uses no liturgical chants but relies entirely on four melodies of a non-Gregorian character, which may or may not be metrical in keeping with the accentual Latin verse texts. Ex.17 gives the opening melody of the play in the alternative transcriptions adopted by Smoldon and Avalle. The unfortunate ambiguity of pitch further clouds the issues of interpretation. However, the fact that a melody may have to serve the purposes of more than one character (e.g. melody 3, for merchants as well as the foolish virgins) means that theories of leitmotifs must be regarded as strained as well as anachronistic (cf St Nicholas plays, §II, 6 above). The music helps the listener to stand away from the characters, not to identify with them.
The second isolated drama, the Play of Adam, is in fact three plays in sequence: Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, and prophet play. The sole surviving manuscript (F-TOm 927, 12th century) is in Anglo-Norman and the play is generally thought to have been written in England. It differs from Sponsus in that the action is conducted entirely in the spoken vernacular; there is no musical notation in the text, but the singularly detailed Latin stage directions require the singing of two Latin lessons and seven responsories. Studer’s edition (1918) has been superseded by those of Aebischer (1963), Sletsjoe (1968) and Noomen (1971). The basic musical study is by Chailley (in Cohen, 1936). Chailley supplied contemporary responsories from an antiphoner of St Maur-des-Fossés (F-Pn lat.12044); Doyle (1948) supplied them from the Worcester Antiphoner (see PalMus, 1st ser., xii). Muir’s monograph (1973) is the only full-length study, but somewhat neglects the music.
The Play of Adam is remarkable in several ways: for a depth of psychological penetration almost unrivalled in medieval European drama; for the fullness of its stage directions; and for its unique combination of musical and spoken dramatic effects. The power and subtlety with which the myth is re-created as a human drama is in the strongest imaginative contrast to the effect of the liturgical chants. In ancient use all these responsories belonged to the nocturns of Matins of Septuagesima (formerly of Sexagesima) and it is to this liturgical season, though not precisely (it is thought) to this liturgical Office, that the play pertains. There is another reason for not overestimating, with older scholars, the new ‘freedom’ and ‘emancipation’ of the play: like Sponsus and the Play of Daniel, the Play of Adam leads to the prophecies of Christ’s coming, and like almost all medieval religious drama on Old Testament themes is a play about Christ. Adam’s formal lament after the Fall is directed partly against his wife’s treachery, but above all it proclaims Man’s redemption.
The dramatic method of the play of the Fall (which contains six of the responsories) is generally to announce themes in the chanted responsories and then to work them out in the form of dramatic ‘tropes’. Thus the responsory Formavit igitur Dominus (‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground …’) precedes God’s speech describing the creation of Adam (ex.18). In a reading of the play it is easy to overlook the ‘primary, framing power of liturgical music in and around the play’ (Stevens, 1968): these majestic responsories, unfolding at length, need to be heard. The singers are named as the chorus, probably the choir of the church. They take no part in the dramatic action themselves but clearly in some sense represent the heavenly host. Their plainchant singing is always associated with God’s own appearances and actions (this is why there is only one responsory in the Cain and Abel play) – a fact that relates the musical dramatic technique of the Play of Adam to the technique of the later mysteries (§III, 2(i) above).
The Provençal saint play St Agnes contrasts with both Sponsus and the Play of Adam. It was copied in the 14th century (I-Rvat Chigi C.V.151) and probably written not much earlier. The most convenient modern edition is by Jeanroy (1931) with musical appendix by Gérold (see also Hoepffner, 1950, and Monaci, 1880, with facsimiles). The unoriginal story, full of the sensational clichés of medieval hagiography, tells of Agnes’s refusal to marry the son of the Roman prefect, Simpronius, and of the consequence: she is brought to trial and sentenced to be put in a brothel. Her hair grows miraculously to cover her nakedness, an angelic light repels all advances, and the brothel becomes a house of prayer. In the end, having survived burning at the stake, she dies calmly and is escorted to paradise by angels.
There are 19 or 20 musical (i.e. sung) passages in the play, of which almost all are called planctus, irrespective of whether they are so or not. 15 of the melodies are notated, in square (unmeasured) notation on a four-line staff (i.e. in the style of the troubadour chansonniers); of these three are incomplete, and for another the staff has not been filled in. In addition two liturgical antiphons are given, both from Vespers of the Common of Virgins. A typical Latin stage direction (the text is liberally supplied with them) reads: ‘Mater facit planctum in sonu albe Reis glorios, verai lums et clardat’ (‘The mother makes her complaint to the tune of the dawn-song Reis glorios’). This celebrated alba by Giraut de Bornelh (c1140–1200) survives; most of the other named tunes do not. Ex.19 gives the two versions. The freedom with which the known melody has been modified does not encourage belief that (for instance) the other versions are necessarily very close to those current two centuries earlier. The dramatic function of the music in the play is unusually varied. There are the expected associations with divine action (‘Angelus facit planctum in sonu Veni creator spiritus’) and with lamentation (the mother’s planctus and others); but music is also a vehicle for prayer (e.g. of the prostitutes after their conversion and baptism). The instrumental music of tibicinatores is also required for an angelic silete (see §III, 3(ii) below).
The so-called Shrewsbury fragments (GB-SHRs VI; discovered in 1890) present unsolved problems, especially musical ones. The text provides a single actor’s part (with cues) for three plays: an Officium pastorum, a Visitatio sepulchri (the manuscript has the title Officium Resurrectionis in die Pasche) and a Peregrinus. The English passages are in a north-west Midlands dialect and were spoken; the Latin passages were evidently sung and nine of them are notated in black mensural notation on a five-line staff. The manuscript was copied in about 1430 (Rankin, 1975–6) almost entirely by one scribe (see Davis, 1970). The first thorough edition of the text was made by Young (1933, ii, appx B); that by Davis has musical transcriptions by Harrison. The other contents of the manuscript are mostly processional pieces (listed by Young, and by Rankin) but ff.8–14 contain the part of the Jews from the Passions of Palm Sunday and Holy Week. Rankin (1975–6) showed that the existing book contains processional music; that two companion books, now lost, probably contained the rest of a three-part musical texture; and that the book was used in Lichfield Cathedral, where, it is known, liturgical plays on precisely these three subjects were performed.
The actor-singer of this manuscript was the Third Shepherd, the Third Mary and, probably, the disciple Cleophas. Of the nine notated items, six are known texts from liturgical plays or from the liturgy. ‘Mane nobiscum’, for example, in the Peregrinus play is an ancient antiphon (Hartker etc.) which was used in plays at Saintes, Fleury, Benediktbeuern, Frankfurt and elsewhere (Schuler, 1951). The main musical problem, articulated by both Harrison and Rankin, is the precise relationship between the chant and the existing line, and thus the type of compositional process concerned. Possible solutions are discussed by Rastall (1996), but without the companion manuscripts the problem is perhaps insoluble.
The Shrewsbury fragments have been regarded as an essential link in the ‘evolutionary’ theory of medieval drama showing the emergence of vernacular plays from liturgical (some parallel between the English speeches of this Officium pastorum and York play no.15 is unquestioned). However, that theory is now discredited, and the Shrewsbury plays should perhaps be regarded as a late survival of a rare genre that also includes the Play of Adam.
Medieval drama, §III, 2: Vernacular drama: Early and miscellaneous plays
There is only one surviving secular play with a significant amount of music, Adam de la Halle’s Robin et Marion; its quality makes the loss of others regrettable. It appears to have been written in about 1283, when Adam was in the service of Robert II, Count of Artois. At that time the count was in southern Italy, but the play is thoroughly ‘Artesian’, not Italian in any sense; it was written to amuse expatriate northern French soldiers as part of the Christmas festivities. It is a sophisticated piece of light entertainment consisting of a dramatized pastourelle (a lyric depicting an amorous encounter between a shepherdess and a roving knight) with a dramatized bergerie (a lyric describing the songs, dances and games of a group of shepherds). The materials are traditional, but their combination into this musical comedy is Adam’s own achievement. The play survives in three manuscripts, the earliest and most authoritative being F-Pn fr.25566 (the ‘complete works’ of Adam de la Halle, c1300); F-AIXm 572 also contains the music, but F-Pn fr.1569 has only empty staves. There have been numerous editions of the play from 1822 onwards. Varty’s (1960) lists previous editions and prints the music, which is also available in a modern English translation of the play (Axton and Stevens, 1971). Essential information from the musical point of view is provided by Gennrich’s edition (1962) and Chailley’s article (1950).
The music consists of 16 melodies dispersed throughout the play. (Adam’s other play, Le jeu de la feuillée, contains only one, but of the same type, sung by three fairies.) They are short, rhythmical and syllabic; the notation, in complete contrast to that of Adam’s courtly chansons (F-Pn fr.25566), is clearly metrical though not totally unambiguous. It is rather unlikely that Adam wrote any of them himself; they belong to the category of courtly popular melodies known as refrains (see Refrain) and several of them are found elsewhere. The melody of Robins m’aime, for instance, is also used as the motetus of a three-voice motet; that of Avoec tele compaignie occurs in the narrative poem Renart le nouvel and elsewhere (Gennrich, 1962). The melodies in fact belong with the words, and the author-composer has imported both together into the play. In this he followed the courtly fashion of the times. ‘The melodies of the play of Robin et Marion possess practically all the characteristics of the “refrain-centos” of the romances and chansons of the period – especially of the pastourelles and bergeries’ (Chailley, 1950) (in particular they are metrically independent from their context). The instruments introduced – a chievrete (a species of bagpipe) and two cornes (horns) – are also entirely in keeping with the lighthearted aristocratic stylization of country life.
One must not make heavy weather of the musical side of this delightful and essentially traditional entertainment; Robin et Marion is indeed a jeu, a playing. The element of dramatic illusion is very lightly handled, and the play has something of the nature of a revue (though without the overt topical references of Le jeu de la feuillée).
Medieval drama, §III: Vernacular drama
Medieval drama, §III, 3: Vernacular drama: The main traditions
Fewer plays survive from medieval England than from France or Germany, but they are probably representative of dramatic activity at least in the Midlands and the north. Complete mystery cycles survive from the Wakefield area (the ‘Towneley’ plays), York, Chester and (probably) the Norfolk-Suffolk border (the ‘N-Town’ plays, formerly known as the ‘Hegge’ plays and published under the misleading title Ludus Coventriae). Two plays remain (of a likely ten or so) from the real Coventry cycle. A cycle in medieval Cornish also survives in three sections: an Origo mundi, a Passion and a Resurrection (no events after the Ascension are represented). No texts survive of the Passion plays known to have been performed in London and southern England, although the Passion sequence of the N-Town plays evidently started life as a two-part drama of this type. Discussion continues about the nature of the lost ‘Creed’ and ‘Pater noster’ plays. Isolated biblical plays survive from Norwich, Newcastle, Northampton, Brome (Suffolk) and elsewhere. Performances of saint plays are recorded but very few survive; a fine 15th-century play of St Mary Magdalen and an early 16th-century play of the conversion of St Paul are all that remain. In addition, however, the ‘Contemplacio’ group from the N-Town plays probably originally formed a play on the early life of the Virgin, and the N-Town Assumption play apparently started life as an independent drama (see Meredith, 1983). The tradition of folk drama rests almost entirely on 19th- and 20th-century evidence, apart from the remarkable discovery of an early 16th-century Scottish Plough Play in a musical version (ed. in MB, xv, 1957). The four main cycles each contain plays covering the history of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgment. The contents of the cycles and the location of their manuscripts are listed in Chambers (1903, ii, appx X); his appendix Y (pp.329–406) lists representations of medieval plays from all over Britain (see also Stratman, 1954, 1972, i, pp.345ff; Lancashire, 1984). Recent work by REED editors has, however, uncovered evidence of considerable dramatic activity at parish level, still largely to be explored.
Little actual music is given in the English manuscripts: there are two English songs in the Coventry Plays, some two-voice Latin polyphony in the York cycle and a short monophonic Gloria in the Chester cycle (all discussed in Rastall, 1996). The number and usefulness of musical stage directions varies from cycle to cycle, but the Chester and N-Town cycles each contain over 30. Beuscher (1930) listed and analysed the musical repertory; Moore (1923), Stevens (1957–8), Carpenter (1968), Dutka (1973) and Rastall (1996) describe the dramatic functions of the music.
Most of the musical directions require the singing of liturgical Latin texts, presumably to plainchant (canticles, antiphons, hymns, sequences, communions, offertories and versus alleluiatici). These pieces are often liturgically appropriate. Thus the Digby Candlemass Day Play (Slaughter of the Innocents combined with Purification) contains the stage direction: ‘here shal Symeon bere Iesu in his armys, goyng a procession rounde aboute the tempill; and al this wyle the virgynis synge nunc dimittis’. The Nunc dimittis, besides being the canticle of Compline, was special to the feast of the Purification, when it was sung with its antiphon Lumen ad revelationem at the blessing of the candles (Sarum Processional). The hymns include: Veni, Creator (Chester, Play of the Holy Ghost; York plays of the Baptism, the Temptation and Pentecost); Jhesu, corona virginum (N-Town, Presentation BVM); Stella celi extirpavit (N-Town, Shepherds’ Play); Gloria laus (N-Town, Entry into Jerusalem); Salvator mundi (Towneley, Harrowing of Hell; Chester, Last Judgment). There is one striking exception to the general observation that the liturgical songs are unconnected with the liturgical drama. The isolated Christ’s Burial and Resurrection (GB-Ob E.museo 160; ed. Baker, Murphy and Hall, 1982) makes extensive use of the Easter sequence Victime paschali (see above). The play is in effect an English Marienklage, with a Visitatio sepulchri added to it as second part (‘This is a play to be played, on[e] part on Gud Friday afternone, & the other part opon Ester Day after the resurrection, in the morowe’). The Latin sequence is sung in dramatic dialogue by the three Marys, Peter, Andrew and John. The rubric is of unusual interest: ‘These three [Marys] shall sing it right through to “Dic nobis” in polyphony [cantifracto] or at least antiphonally [in pallinodio]’.
Indications of Latin polyphony are rare and seldom unambiguous. But such directions as ‘the hefne syngynge’, ‘they shal synge in hefne this hympne: “Jhesu corona”’ may well refer to professional polyphonic singing (by the ‘angels’ on the scaffold of ‘Heaven’). The elaborate vocal style of the angelic musicians (perhaps the clerks or children of the local cathedral) is invariably the subject of comment by the shepherds (‘I dar say that he broght/foure and twenty to a long’: Towneley, Second Shepherds’ Play). The measured monophonic Gloria in excelsis Deo of the Chester plays (ex.20, from GB-Lbl Harl.2124) does not seem adequate to the occasion, and may be simply a cue for a known polyphonic setting (Rastall, 1996).
Play 45 of the York cycle (GB-Lbl Add.35290; text ed. Beadle, 1982) is uniquely valuable as containing the only fully notated Latin polyphonic music in an English dramatic source (see fig.9; colour facs. in Beadle and Meredith, 1983): it is The Assumption of the Virgin, staged by the Weavers’ Guild. Three songs are sung by angels in the course of the Blessed Virgin’s Assumption witnessed by the apostle Thomas: Surge, propera mea, Veni de Libano sponsa and Veni, electa mea. The texts are derived mainly from the Song of Songs, with material also from the Psalms: Veni, electa mea is liturgical, but no use is made of the chant. Each text is set twice, once in the course of the play (notated in score), once at the end of the play (each part written separately and not aligned with its fellow). The music is in a characteristic but not common 15th-century style (ex.21), for two equal voices of limited range, with long melodies, a strong metrical pulse, marked cross-rhythms, and a non-expressive relationship between the words and the music. The settings in the second group are rather more ornate. For transcriptions of this music see Wall, 1971, with transcriptions by Steiner; Dutka, 1980; Beadle, 1982, with transcriptions by Stevens; and Rastall, 1984. The pieces are discussed in Rastall, 1996.
Part-singing to vernacular texts certainly took place as well. The Second Shepherds’ Play (Towneley) contains a three-voice song, the first shepherd taking ‘the tenory’, the second ‘the tryble so hye’ and the third ‘the meyne’; although neither music nor text is given, this seems likely to have been a vernacular song. In the Towneley First Shepherds’ Play the further remark ‘Syng we in syght’ suggests a style of improvised singing such as English discant (Carpenter, 1951; see Discant, §II). The Cornish plays require part-singing from Beelzebub, Satan and Tulfric. But vernacular singing is not synonymous with part-singing even in late manuscripts. In the Chester Deluge the psalm Noah and his family sing in the Ark is Save mee, O God (probably Psalm xlix, in the metrical version of Sternhold and Hopkins), probably to be sung in unison; and it is even less likely that the drinking-song of Noah’s wife and her ‘good gossips’ was a contrapuntal artefact.
Once again a single survival helps to fill the gap. The Coventry Shepherds’ Play is the only dramatic source of vernacular partsong with music. Unfortunately, the original manuscript (completed in 1534) was burnt in 1879; the songs have to be reconstructed from Sharp (1825/R). There are only two musical settings in three parts: As I outrode this enderes night (a refrain-song using imitative entries), and Lully, lulla … O sisters too (in chordal style). The play requires other songs for which music has not survived.
Concerning instrumental music the English sources are disappointingly silent. The very late Chester manuscripts (five of the complete cycle, all from about 1600; see Lumiansky and Mills, 1974) give some idea, especially in the Creation and Fall of Man, how frequently the minstrels may have been called on. They are to play music (unspecified) when God creates the world, when God takes Adam to paradise, when God re-enters after the Fall, twice when Adam and Eve are expelled, and when God appears to Cain. But this evidence may be valid only for Elizabethan performances. No English ‘director’s copy’ survives comparable to (for example) the documents of Frankfurt and Mons (ed. Cohen, 1925). Information about instrumental music has to be pieced together from the texts, from the stage directions and from account books (the records of Chester and Coventry are especially helpful). N-Town stage directions refer to trumpets (‘hic dum buccinant’), harps or lutes (citharis) and ?organs (organa). The colourful mid-16th-century Coventry accounts list payments: to ‘the trumpeter’, for regals, for ‘dromming’, to ‘six musicissions’, to ‘two clarks for singing’, ‘to Thomas Nycles for settyng a songe’ (Ingram, 1981). Directions such as ‘fluryshe’ and ‘pipe … that we may dance’ (especially at the end of Cornish plays) indicate what haut musicians were principally required for – fanfares and dance music.
Religious plays in the vernacular raise problems about the dramatic function of music which do not exist in liturgical drama. No set of vernacular plays, and in particular no English cycle, is sufficiently well rubricated to show exactly the occasions on which music was required, the precise nature of the pieces, or the effects they were intended to produce. Certain broad uses of music emerge, however, as well-established principles. Music assists stage-business and provides dramatic symbolism. The stage-business principally required music to cover the exits and entrances (i.e. the movements of main characters to and from their ‘scaffolds’, ‘pageants’, ‘houses’, ‘stages’ etc.). After the Prologue of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (by two vexillatores, banner-bearers), the minstrel is exhorted to ‘blow up with a mery stevyn’ (a cheerful sound), probably to announce the entry of the first player, Aristorius Mercator. This ‘fanfare’ could, however, also be a call for silence (cf the silete of the French and German plays). Such music was not necessarily instrumental: Mary Magdalen contains the curious direction ‘here shall entyr a shyp with a mery song’ (however, ‘song’ could mean simply ‘music’ in this period). In the N-Town Magi play Herod tells his minstrel to ‘blowe up a good blast’ while he goes to his chamber to change his clothes. This is evidently a short musical interlude marking the end of a scene.
The music of stage-business merges naturally with the music of dramatic naturalism. That King Herod has a minstrel (the trumpeter?) in attendance at court imitates the conditions of actual medieval life, while religious ceremonies, Christian, pagan or Jewish (e.g. in the N-Town plays, the blessing of Mary’s parents Joachim and Anna in the Temple) are enriched with appropriate liturgical chants and actions (‘There they shal synge this sequens. “Benedicta sit beata Trinitas”, And in that tyme Ysakar with his ministerys ensensyth the Autere’). At the entry into Jerusalem ‘myghtfull songes’ are sung ‘here on a rawe’ (cf the ‘royal entries’, ‘joyeuses entrées’, of medieval city life). Music is also used to depict misery. The tradition of the planctus does not appear to have taken root in England, and there are no surviving settings of laments that can be connected with plays; formal laments do however appear in play texts and are sometimes directed to be sung (e.g. Norwich, Fall; Cornish, Resurrection).
The boundary between naturalistic imitation and dramatic symbolism is equally hard to draw precisely (this applies to the whole dramatic technique, not simply the music). The trumpeters ‘blow up’ while Herod changes his clothes, play as the ‘servyse’ of the feast comes in, and entertain Herod and his knights by celebrating the imagined death of the Christ-child; they also symbolize the pretensions of earthly kingship, the lust of the eyes and pride of life. The startling irruption of Death into this scene makes it, in effect, a Dance of Death in which music (especially that of trumpets) is a principal symbol of illusory power (as the dance is of youth and vitality): ‘At this point whilst the minstrels are trumpeting [buccinant], let Death kill Herod and two of his knights, suddenly; and let the Devil take them’ (N-Town, Death of Herod). The most important and perpetually recurrent symbolism, however, is that of music as an image of the divine. ‘When God appears on a “scaffold” between two angels, or more, playing musical instruments [or singing], we know that God is in his heaven … a place of order and harmony’. He would be literally in ‘heaven’, too – the usual term for his ‘scaffold’ (see York, Creation; Chester, Fall of Lucifer etc.). ‘Music is never employed in the English drama “for atmosphere”; it is never there for an emotive effect. It is there, like God’s beard of gold, or the horned animal heads of the devils, because it signifies something’ (Stevens, 1957–8). By a natural extension of the symbol, music is used to signify the divine authority of God’s messengers, the angels. A further extension enables music to represent human gladness and gratitude in response to God’s acts of power and love: that of Adam and the prophets released from limbo (Harrowing of Hell plays); Mary’s humble acceptance of Gabriel’s message (Annunciation plays); and above all the shepherds’, whose glad songs have been discussed above (there is no shepherds’ play without music).
A further function of music, hinted at by Carpenter (1951), Wall (1971) and Dutka (1980), is to aid or supplement numerological structures in the design of the drama. This is discussed by Rastall (1996), in respect of the York cycle.
Medieval drama, §III, 3: Vernacular drama: The main traditions
The earliest religious plays, after those discussed (§III, 2(ii–iii) above), are miracles, plays based on miraculous incidents in saints’ lives. Two of the earliest are Le jeu de Saint Nicolas by Jehan Bodel and Rutebeuf’s Le miracle de Théophile; neither text contains music or directions for music. However, a collection survives from the 14th century, Les miracles de Notre Dame (20 dramatized miracles in F-Pn fr.819–20, the ‘Cangé Manuscripts’); in each play the Virgin works a miracle of salvation for a miserable sinner (a pregnant abbess, a child handed over to the Devil, a bribed pope etc.). As in other European countries, the 14th and 15th centuries saw the growth of massive religious play cycles in France. Unlike the surviving English cycles the French ones do not usually cover all history from the Creation to the Last Judgment; their distinguishing feature is often a framework of the Trial of Man. The earliest is La passion du Palatinus (14th century; ed. Frank, 1922), which opens with the entry into Jerusalem; Le jour du jugement (14th century; ed. Roy, 1903–4) deals only with Antichrist and the Last Judgment but has 94 characters, imposing theatrical effects and music. The 15th-century plays of most interest to the music historian are Le passion de Semur (Creation to Ascension, 9582 lines, performed in two days; ed. Roy, 1903–4, and Durbin and Muir, 1981); La nativité, la passion et la résurrection de nostre Saulveur Jhesu-Crist of Arnoul Greban (including also Creation, over 30,000 lines, four days; ed. Jodogne, 1965); the Rouen L’incarnation et la nativité (1474; 12,800 lines, two days; ed. Verdier, 1884–6); and the Vie (or Mystère) de Saint Louis (before 1472; 224 characters, three days; ed. Michel, 1871). Each play in the large repertory of mystères and miracles is analysed in detail in Petit de Julleville’s Les mystères (1880, ii). Only Le jour du jugement (F-B 579) and La passion de Semur (F-Pn fr.904) contain musical notation; the Rouen Incarnation has room for part-music to be filled in (by hand – the text is printed). For accounts of music on the medieval French stage, see especially PirroHM and Brown (1963). Editions of French vernacular plays are listed in Stratman (1954, 2/1972, ii, items 7050–7661).
As in other vernacular dramas the principal music is plainchant. In the Mystère de Saint Louis a litany is sung by a bishop, an abbot and a dean. Hymns are frequent: Vexilla regis (Saint Louis), Veni Redemptor gentium (Mystère de Saint Vincent, 1476), Gloria tibi Domine (Martyre de Saint Denis), Aurora lucis (Résurrection de Jesus-Christ by Eloy du Mont). Liturgical chants include the Stabat mater (Jean Michel’s Passion, based on Greban’s), Regina celi, antiphon of the BVM (Du Mont) and, expectedly, the concluding Te Deum. The fact that choirs of angels are the most frequent singers does not mean that such music was sung polyphonically. Some hymns, however, may have been sung in fauxbourdon (ReeseMR), and elsewhere there is incontrovertible evidence for polyphonic singing. In Arnoul Greban’s Passion a ‘motet d’onneur’ is sung in hell: Lucifer assigns the tenor to Satan, the ‘contre’ to himself, ‘le dessus’ to Beelzebub, the ‘haulte double’ to Berich and ‘un trouble’ to Cerberus. Eventually they sing the rondeau ‘La dure mort eternelle/c’est la chançon des dampnés’. Further infernal counterpoint occurs in Arnoul Greban’s brother Simon’s Actes des apôtres (see Lebègue, 1929), where however Cerberus ‘mon gros garcon’ is assigned to the ‘bazitonans’ with ‘two really thunderous devils’. The learned compiler of the Rouen Incarnation required three-voice performance of angel song (tenor, contratenor and concordans); and, with trinitarian symbolism, the utterances of God in the Greban and Michel Passion plays are also for three voices (in Michel’s, ‘haut dessus, une haute contre, et une basse contre bien accordés’).
One important distinguishing feature of French religious drama, in marked contrast to the English, is its association from at least the 14th century with a tradition of musical and literary competitions, the Puy. The most informative early document is Les miracles de Notre Dame, written between about 1339 and 1382 by members of the Guild of Goldsmiths in Paris. As Frank (1954) stated:
The 23 lyrical serventoys [sirventes; see Troubadours, trouvères] in praise of the Virgin which appear between certain plays point to a kind of poetical contest fostered by the religious and literary members of the puy that sponsored the Miracles: these pieces refer to the prince du puy at times and once to a serventoys couronné au dit puy.
At Amiens ‘ung jeu de mistère’ was performed at the annual Candlemas banquet; this suggests how the Parisian miracles may have been done. The interspersed serventoys are in a favourite troubadour-trouvère form (five stanzas of ten lines with envoi) and were presumably set to music. The songs within the plays give the same impression of literary sophistication and were certainly sung. In accordance with a recurrent pattern, when miraculous intervention is necessary, the Virgin summons the archangels Gabriel and Michael to escort her to earth: they do this singing a rondeau, and the Virgin’s return to the skies is often similarly accompanied. The rondeaux, then, function as a sort of conductus. The tradition (as it seems to be) of interpolated art song continues in the big Passion plays of Greban and Michel. In the shepherd scene (Greban, day 1), four shepherds, apparently singing (perhaps only reciting) in dialogue, perform a string of rondeaux. Even the farcical Le garçon et l’aveugle (13th century; ed. Roques, 1911, 2/1921/R) incorporates a song in honour of the Virgin. In the Rouen Incarnation spoken rondeaux in dialogue introduce the composed songs at important moments; and in one shepherd scene a ‘champ [?chant] royal’ is performed with an envoi apparently addressed to the ‘princes’ of a puy.
A last type of vernacular song is the planctus (complainte). The Autun Passion twice signifies ‘La complainte Nostre Dame’, and the early Passion du Palatinus has laments as do the liturgical plays for Mary Magdalen repentant, for the Virgin at the Cross and for the three Marys visiting Christ’s tomb. No music survives, and the tradition never acquired the importance that it did in German-speaking countries with the Marienklage (§III, 2(i) above).
Instrumental music enlivened the plays from the earliest onwards. One of the Miracles de Notre Dame (play no.3) contains parts for three minstrels, and in the same play the wicked bishop sends for ‘les jugleurs’ for a celebration. Practically every mystère or miracle demands some kind of instrumental support, provided by the local waits or town band, or hired from outside. The Montferrand Passion in 1477 evidently had a total performing ensemble of ‘two organists, seven trumpeters, and four unspecified ménétriers, to which should be added two more “tronpetes de la tour”’ (Brown, 1963). The composition, if not the size, of the group seems to have been standard. The unspecified musicians would probably play haut wind instruments – shawms and sackbuts – combining to provide the usual dance band. The dance of Salome was an expected feature of the St John the Baptist scenes; sometimes a tambourin (drum) accompanied her, or pipe and tabor (Mons, Passion). Elsewhere dances are indicated: the morisque (Michel’s Passion; Semur etc.), the orliennaise (? the basse danse ‘Orleans’) and a ‘sauterelle’ (Mystère de Saint Louis). The stage directions of the Rouen Incarnation require instrumentalists to join the singers in the chansons which decorate the play, but in each case they alternate with the singers; they do not accompany them.
The dramatic function of music in the plays conforms to international patterns. The function is threefold: to imitate naturalistic effects in stage terms, to further the stage-business and to act as symbol. These categories inevitably overlap. The naturalistic effects include music for feasts (Miracles de Notre Dame), for a coronation (Mystère de Saint Louis: all the instruments available played for the Sultan’s), for a royal entry (e.g. La vengeance nostre Seigneur: trumpets and clarions) and for royal proclamations (Mystère des trois doms). The feigned naturalism of the angel musicians in the Rouen Incarnation is especially interesting. These particular musicians could evidently only sing, but when the ‘joueurs d’instrumens’ played behind and out of sight, the angels were to ‘act as if they were playing’. The stage-business includes the entrances and exits of important characters, for which fanfares were commonly used. But perhaps the most common signals for a musical event of some kind are the directions ‘pause’ (or ‘pose’) and ‘silete’. The latter originated as a call for order – ‘Keep silence, keep silence’ (see §III, 3(iii) below), and was sung by angels, the principal musicians available. Thence it became the generic term (with ‘pause’) for a musical interlude, often marking the end of one scene and the beginning of another. In the Greban Passion (to choose one out of scores of examples) the creation of Eve ends with God saying: ‘Arise my angels, legion by legion, … and sing a joyous silete’ – God the Father retires to his ‘siège’ and the angels sing. Such interludes covered the movement of actors about the ‘place’ (the main acting area) and in and out of their ‘houses’ (sièges, lieux, mansions, estages etc.). The director’s book for the Mons Passion of 1501 (Le livre de conduite du régisseur; see Cohen, 1925) says ‘If God takes too long [i.e. in getting from one position to another], silete’. The same book requires a silete during the mimed building of Noah’s Ark. On this occasion the alternative to a silete is a ‘poze d’orghues’, or minstrel music ‘de quelque instrument’. Elsewhere a ‘poze de menestraux’ is specified. The French documents, unlike the German, never specify, let alone notate, the precise music to be performed. Minstrels presumably played pieces from their regular repertory on these occasions (Brown, 1963).
The symbolic effects of music in the French plays correspond to those described for the English cycles. Music symbolizes first and foremost the joy and order of heaven and heavenly truth; it therefore accompanies the appearances and acts of God and his messengers, the angels. So frequent and expected is this function of dramatic music that in the plays from the Bibliothèque Ste Geneviève (ed. Jubinal, 1837/R) the angels are sometimes told to come and go ‘sans chanter’. Only the best music is good enough for heaven; hence, perhaps, the requirement (Mons, 1501) that the angels in paradise should sing ‘en chose faicte’ (i.e. res facta, thus ‘counterpoint’). The divine significance of music can be transferred to a pagan temple (‘pose d’orgues’: Mons, 1501). The obverse of heavenly music is hellish din. Hell is the place for thunders and tempests: after the Fall of Lucifer, ‘here they must make a great storm’ (Greban). Polyphonic singing in hell has already been noted, from the same Passion. Infernal singing could evidently take on a deliberately discordant aspect: in the Liber beate Barbare (Petit de Julleville, 1880, ii) Lucifer orders a chanson ‘with unmelodious music’.
Once again, however, the difficulty and danger of establishing hard and fast categories to describe dramatic function are evident. They can be illustrated from the shepherds’ plays. Of these one of the most extended and sophisticated representations is in the Rouen Incarnation, 1474. The shepherd scenes occur on the second day. At their first entrance four individually named shepherds sing rondeaux in dialogue (see above); a little later they sing ‘Requiescant in pace’. Their next scene is, most unusually, a music lesson. Anathot, a young shepherd, asks his elder, Ludin, what the art of singing is called. Ludin replies ‘Music’. Anathot exclaims ‘Music, what a frightful word!’. At this Ludin instructs him in music with frequent reference to the theory of Johannes de Muris. They finish with a two-part song. At the crib five shepherds sing En paissant nos brebis (printed staff left void). Further episodes contain a ‘praise’ of great shepherds of the past and the long three-voice chanson that Ludin and Anathot compose to conclude the whole play (no music).
In these scenes music is presented as part of the natural (naturalistic, in dramatic terms) presentation of shepherd life – pipes and tabors, and dancing and singing, inevitably go with them; as an extension of the shepherds’ poetic creativity (the shepherd David is a type of the poet-musician and often appears as a minstrel with harp in vernacular drama); and as a symptom and symbol of their simple integrity and devotion (pastoral idealization of religious experience).
Medieval drama, §III, 3: Vernacular drama: The main traditions
The surviving repertory of plays in the German vernacular is larger, more varied and musically more interesting than that of any other language. The five main types of play are: Easter plays in which the central scene is the visit of the three Marys to the sepulchre; Easter plays in which the complaint of Mary (the planctus Marie) is extensively developed – the Marienklagen; Passion plays (Passionen) treating the events of Holy Week more comprehensively; Corpus Christi plays (Fronleichnamspiele) somewhat similar to the English mystery cycles in their scope; and Christmas plays. There also existed in parts of Germany, as elsewhere, a tradition of folk plays. These were associated principally with the celebrations (revels) of Shrove Tuesday (Fastnachtspiele). Music and dance certainly played some part in them, but their study belongs rather to folklore and anthropology.
The vernacular religious drama of Germany (i.e. of the German-speaking countries) is generally said to begin with the Osterspiel of Muri (13th century). The drama was still flourishing in the early 17th century (e.g. in Lucerne) and is demonstrably the same in essentials, though influenced by the events and the theological upheavals of the Reformation. As in England, the plays reached their peak of popularity and creativity in the 15th and early 16th centuries. From the 14th century onwards certain districts were particularly active in play production: the mid-western districts around Frankfurt and, later, the Tyrol; but the religious drama was widespread and plays survive from many towns, including Breslau, Regensburg, Augsburg and Konstanz.
There is no complete collected edition of German medieval plays. The most substantial collections are by Mone (1841; 1846), Froning (1891–2) and Hartl (1936–42); the latest edition does not always provide the best text. None of these contains music. A useful up-to-date account of the drama from a literary and dramatic standpoint is W.F. Michael’s Das deutsche Drama des Mittelalters (1971), with bibliography, descriptions of the contents of the plays and full details about editions. The sources of all liturgical and vernacular Easter plays are described, and their contents listed (by song incipit) and cross-referred in Schuler’s Die Musik der Osterfeiern, Osterspiele und Passionen des Mittelalters (1951). His 50-page introduction is the longest single account of the music of the Easter plays (Christmas and other plays do not figure in his book). More comprehensive and up to date, though inevitably compressed, is the appropriate section of Lipphardt’s fundamental article in MGG1. Editions are listed in Stratman (1954, enlarged 2/1972, ii, items 7992–8184); see also Muir, 1995.
The five principal sources of information about music in the plays are: accounts of payments to performers (e.g. Lucerne, 1571); documents relating to their production (e.g. the ‘Frankfurter Dirigierrolle’, early 14th century, ed. Froning); stage directions, normally in Latin; references in stage directions or in the text to the required music; and actual notated music. Music was evidently required for all productions, but unfortunately only a few play manuscripts fall into the fifth category. In the comprehensive list of sources given by Lipphardt (MGG1) those containing written music are asterisked; of these the most important, Marienklagen excepted, are the Alsfeld Passion (see Dreimüller, 1936), the Vienna Passion (see Orel, 1926) and the Erlau Plays (see Osthoff, 1942). The music is generally monophonic, whether its origin is ecclesiastical or secular, and even in quite late sources is written in Hufnagel neumes, the characteristic unmeasured German notation. Some sources contain some mensural notation (e.g. Erlau) and a few have part-music in the form of rounds or canons (Osnabrück, Lucerne). In the late plays (or rather, late versions of plays) more elaborate part-music was certainly called for. A simple two-voice Silete, silete from the Trier play Theophilus (ed. Bohn, 1877) and a vernacular Nu hört, wo sik Theophil gaf in the same style survive. In the Lucerne plays the Kantorei (choir of professional singers) sang ‘figuraliter’ (usually interpreted as polyphonic music) and ‘devota cantio ad organum’ (elsewhere a ‘Positif’ is named) and ‘brevis moteta’ (Evans, 1943; Schuler, 1951). Such musical requirements belong, however, to the very end of the medieval dramatic tradition. In general the play music belongs to the history of monophonic music, but the surviving evidence does not allow of any dogmatic assertion to this effect, and earlier fashions of polyphony may have served earlier generations.
The different musical traditions that come together in the vernacular drama cannot be understood without reference to the curious dramatic amalgam that occurs in many plays. A fair sample of the potpourri is provided by the late 14th-century ‘Innsbruck’ Osterspiel (A-Iu, ed. Meier, 1963; the manuscript is of mid-German provenance). In this the often grotesque comedy is quite naively juxtaposed with liturgical, or quasi-liturgical, action and music. It has the interest of being the earliest surviving Osterspiel, apart from the Osterspiel of Muri, the unique early vernacular play (13th century). Unlike the Muri play, the ‘Innsbruck’ play set a pattern: the Vienna and Erlau plays are closely related to it. It may therefore fairly be taken as displaying the essential features and raising the essential problems of the vernacular music drama. These features can be summarized as the alternation or juxtaposition of song and speech, the wide range of musical material, and the equally wide range of musical function.
The bizarre contrasts of mood and treatment that occur in most German vernacular plays (except the Marienklagen) are mirrored not only linguistically in the use of various kinds of Latin (liturgical prose, rhymed hymns and sequences, goliardic verse) and of German (from doggerel narrative to laments in a high style), but also musically in the combination of very different musical traditions. They are, briefly: the old liturgical plainchant, together with newer pieces from the repertory of tropes and sequences; ‘quasi-plainchant’ from the repertory of the liturgical drama itself; the planctus; courtly and ‘clerical’ song (i.e. epic song, Minnesang and goliard song); and popular song, religious and secular. To these should be added a category of professional instrumental music about which regrettably little is known.
The variety of Latin song and plainchant is exemplified by the Wolfenbüttel Osterspiel (ed. Schönemann, 1855). Among the various items are familiar antiphons (e.g. Quis revolvet), hymns (e.g. Jesu, nostra redemptio), laments of the Marys (Heu, nobis internas etc.; cf Origny Ludus paschalis), the Trisagion (‘Sancte Deus … sancte fortis … sancte et immortalis’) and the Easter sequence Victime paschali. As this brief list shows, a vernacular Osterspiel is inevitably closely linked both to other Osterspiele and to the larger plays within the Latin liturgical tradition – in particular the Ludi paschales of Origny, Klosterneuburg and Tours. Basically there is only one Osterspiel, in a number of variant forms. This comment applies equally (perhaps more) to their music. Every single piece of liturgical or quasi-liturgical chant from the Wolfenbüttel play can be paralleled elsewhere, commonly in ten or 12 sources (Schuler, 1951, listed 31 occurrences of the antiphon Mulier quid ploras); antiphons and hymns (or hymn-like strophic songs) are especially frequent, and the Trisagion formula from the Good Friday liturgy occurs in no fewer than 19 vernacular plays (like a number of other Latin chants it does not seem to appear in liturgical drama). Until all these plays are available in sound scholarly texts with their music, it will be impossible to say how wide the musical variations are and what their significance is.
Not all the music in the Wolfenbüttel Osterspiel is of liturgical origin or shows liturgical affinities. Lipphardt (1948) argued that the three strophes Heu nobis internas, Jam percusso and Sed eamus have no relation to hymn, sequence or any other form. Melodies of this type belong to the planctus tradition whose development in German drama has already been sketched (§III, 2(i) above, Marienklagen).
One recurrent scene in vernacular drama especially encouraged the introduction of worldly song (far more worldly than the serious melodies just discussed) – the sinful early career of Mary Magdalen. In the Erlauer Mary Magdalen Play (Erlau IV; see Osthoff, 1942) there are 713 German lines and ten Latin; 90 lines are musically notated; 26 have void staves. The text is full of remarks such as ‘Ich will preisen meinen leib mit tanzen und mit raien’, and ‘wir schullen singen, springen, raien den maien auf der Strasse’. The melodies have a ‘popular’ lilt and the rich individual character of late medieval song. The Alsfeld Passion (c1500) also has some notated songs, one being strongly reminiscent, verbally at least, of the songs of the goliards; Rubin, the merchant’s man, sings it to advertise his master: ‘Hic est magister Ypocras/de gracia bovina’. A slightly less blasphemous version is sung by the same character in the ‘Innsbruck’ Osterspiel and in other plays.
To draw sharp distinctions between the different sources of songs in the vernacular drama is unrealistic; but the range of non-liturgical song is wide. The ‘Hessische’ Weihnachtsspiel (? from Friedberg; see Lipphardt, 1958) is of particular interest, for it contains Christmas songs, some of them still sung today, of a kind different from and more artless than any previously mentioned. One stage direction runs: ‘And so the serving-man and Joseph dance around the crib singing: In dulce jubilo. And then the angels begin Sunt impleta’. Other popular religious songs include Eya, eya, virgo Deum genuit, Puer nobis nascitur and Eyn Kint geborn zu Bethleem.
It is one thing to identify the different musical traditions – liturgical and paraliturgical, courtly and popular – that contribute to the vernacular drama; it is another to describe the dramatic function of the music in all its variety. It is clear that, in the first place, music had some strictly practical uses. The most striking is the use of angel song, as in the French plays, to keep the audience quiet, or rather to bring them to order. The song Silete, silete, silentium habete appears from the early 14th century onwards and is associated with the larger plays. A change from one acting-place to another causes disturbance and noise, the silete quells it. In the St Gallen Passion almost every ‘entrance’ is heralded by the silete (Schuler, 1951). They were doubtless usually monophonic. Ex.22 gives a setting from the Vienna Osterspiel (1472) edited by Osthoff.
These angels are scarcely part of the dramatic action at all, though it is interesting that angels are in fact chosen. (It is also interesting that ‘duo pueri’, for example, could quell the noise of a holiday crowd; but the vision of heaven was no doubt largely responsible, even before they began to sing.) Music employed to create an illusion – of social pomp, good cheer, conviviality – is more clearly part of the action. The marriage feast at Cana called for music; so, in the Lucerne Passions, did the entourage of Goliath and the travels of Joseph and his brothers. There are comparatively few German Christmas plays, and of these none has music-making by shepherds ‘in the fields abiding’, unlike the English plays.
As a dramatic symbol (rather than as a mimetic aid in the simpler sense) music has several functions: first and foremost, to represent divine order (as in the French and English plays); second, and paradoxically, as an image of sin (the Jews frequently sing and dance in their idolatry; Mary Magdalen finds ‘mundi delectatio’ in the same; Herodias dances); third, as an image – as well as a direct expression – of human happiness (the ‘Hessische’ Christmas play); and last, as part of the representation of human sorrow and pain (the planctus of the three Marys and of the Virgin Mary).
Medieval drama, §III, 3: Vernacular drama: The main traditions
The medieval Italian drama can be distinguished from the drama of England, France and Germany by two characteristics: an early tendency towards spectacular visual effects, and the strong influence of a tradition of popular religious song. The combination of spectacle with music was described by a Russian visitor to the 1439 Council at Florence who saw a representation of the Annunciation at the Chiesa dell’Annunziata: ‘God the Father was surrounded by an angel choir and by children with various kinds of musical instruments … Gabriel hovered on a cable from God’s throne to the Blessed Virgin, waving his wings and uttering a song of joy’ (Lipphardt, MGG1). This spectacular element developed later in the large-scale rappresentazioni sacre.
More austere, to judge from the texts, was the tradition of popular laude. The Lauda received powerful impetus from the hysterical religious revivalism of 1260 in Perugia. When the hysteria died down and the processions of flagellants ceased, the laude fostered by the Franciscans were taken up by fraternities, such as the Disciplinati di Santa Croce in Urbino. The earliest ‘dramatic’ laude come from a songbook of this guild – De compassione Filii ad matrem tempore Passionis sue and De compassione matris ad Filium. These are strictly monologues; but dialogues followed: De mutua compassione and De planctu Virginis (Bartholomaeis, 1943, i). A famous early lauda in dramatic form is the Donna del Paradiso, attributed to Jacopone da Todi. It opens with John telling ‘the Lady of Paradise’ that her son has been taken prisoner and Mary asking how this could be. John tells her of Judas’s betrayal, and Mary asks Mary Magdalen to help her. The scene changes (no explicit directions for dramatic performance are given in this or any other manuscripts); Mary begs Pilate not to allow Christ to be tormented, the Jews cry out ‘Crucifige! Crucifige!’ and so on, in formal couplets and quatrains, through a brief narrative of the Crucifixion. The only other speaker is Christ himself who urges his mother to serve his disciples and to take John as her son:
Mamma, col core aflitto
entro a le man te metto
de Joanne mio diletto.
No music survives for this or any other laude drammatiche. But it is certain that they were sung, and reasonable to suppose that, being in similar metres, they were sung to the same type of melody as survives in the two musical laudari at Cortona (I-CT 91) and at Florence (Fn Magl.II.1.122). The simpler syllabic melodies of the Cortona manuscript seem more appropriate than the more melismatic later ones. The function of the music in such strophically composed verse dialogues would be little more than narrative; the music would be a passionless vehicle for the story (as in a folk ballad), not an amplification of or comment on its meaning.
For the fraternities of laymen such as the Disciplinati di Giustizia, di S Fiorenzo and di S Francesco at Perugia, the laudari were the equivalent of missal, antiphoner, troper and so on for clerics (Bartholomaeis, 1943); they covered the whole liturgical year. Some days were set aside for the singing of laude liriche, others for laude drammatiche (also called devozioni), which were performed on such feasts as Sundays in Advent, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Epiphany, Purification, Annunciation and so on. Bartholomaeis printed a cycle of laude from Perugia starting In Dominica de Adventu (an Antichrist ‘play’) and ending with Ufficio dei defunti; 46 laude (Laudes evangeliorum) cover Lent and Holy Week. Lipphardt saw in the laude of the lamenting Virgin the genesis of the German Marienklage. The production of laude spread beyond Perugia, Orvieto and other smaller Umbrian cities to Aquila, Rome, Siena and Florence.
The larger form of Italian medieval drama, the rappresentazione sacra, flourished in Tuscany in the 15th and 16th centuries. Florence, where elaborate processions and pageants were mounted in honour of St John the Baptist, was the principal centre. With one exception, La Passione di Gesu Cristo from Revello (Piedmont), Italian sacred drama did not take the comprehensive, cyclic form of English mystery plays and French mystères. Characteristic hagiographical titles are Rappresentazione di Santa Margherita, … di San Giovanni e Paolo (by Lorenzo de’ Medici, performed 1489 in Florence), … di Rosanna (a secular story dressed up as a saint’s legend) and … di Santa Uliva (the same). Subjects of biblical plays include the Magi (Siena), the Annunciation (Aquila), the Resurrection (Pordenone) and Abraham and Isaac (Florence).
The rappresentazioni sacre were magnificent productions organized by the confraternities. The Rappresentazione di Santa Uliva (? 16th century), for example, was performed over two days with gorgeous scenery, musical intermezzos and appearances of mythological beings somewhat loosely connected to the main plot (Bartholomaeis, 1943, iii, pp.3ff). It is rich in musical stage directions: the sung items of the play include a lauda, hunting-songs, psalms and the Te Deum; the instruments prescribed include corno, tromba and tamburi. The play also demanded elaborate choreography (Bartholomaeis, iii, pp.40, 61 etc.), described fully in the stage directions.
The music of these plays included, then, both secular and sacred songs, both monophony and polyphony (in the Rappresentazione di Santa Margherita (? early 16th century) a caccia is sung, Iamo alla caccia). The functions of music are the expected ones (symbolic, ceremonial etc.) common to other vernacular repertories, with perhaps more emphasis on the spectacle and dance. Even in this late repertory dance-songs are specified: for instance, at the end of the Florence Abraham and Isaac ‘Sarah and all the rest of the household, except Abraham, and the two angels … all together perform a dance [ballo] singing this lauda’. A more theological dance is specified in the preliminary rubric to a Christmas play from Siena: the angels of the heavenly announcement are to leave their ‘capanna’ (? scaffold-stage) and ‘faccino coro’ (? make a dance); ‘with great reverence they adore the Lord, and while the shepherds are on their way, they dance’. The shepherds themselves, after offering their gifts to the Christ-child, go to their station (luogo) ‘ballando e saltando e facendo gran festa’. A last feature of the plays worth consideration is the unusual use of music during scenes of the Passion and Crucifixion. In La Passione e Resurrezione del Colosseo (Rome, ?1489) a ‘chorus of shepherds’ and a ‘second chorus of kings’ (? the Magi) sing songs of lament and dire prophecy as Christ is brought by the Pharisees to Herod. They sing again while Christ is put on the Cross. At the death of Christ, and the rending of the veil of the Temple, ‘the angels come to the cross’ and sing (presumably, rather than declaim) sentences from the Easter Preface and from the Via crucis. The music of the rappresentazioni sacre was discussed by Becherini (1951) and Reese (ReeseMR, pp.171ff); literary texts were provided by Ancona (1872).
Medieval drama, §III, 3: Vernacular drama: The main traditions
Different categories again are required to describe the drama of the Spanish peninsula, which does not obviously follow either the Italian or the French pattern. Such evidence as there is suggests that in liturgical drama French influence predominated. Ripoll and other Catalonian centres had close liturgical links with French centres such as Limoges and Fleury. Donovan’s study of Spanish liturgical drama (1958) is the only major contribution to source material since Young (1933). The distribution of surviving sources seems to indicate that the Latin church drama ‘penetrated Castile and non-Catalonian Spain sporadically, and on a very limited scale, rather than as a vast general movement’. It is almost totally absent from Portuguese sources (Corbin, 1952). However, many plays may simply have been lost. López-Morales (1968) held that there was no dramatic tradition, either liturgical or vernacular, in Spain before Encina. Apart from a few brief religious texts in Latin which are arguably dramatic and the Auto de los Reyes Magos (see below), which is probably the work of a Gascon priest who settled in Toledo, there is little evidence of dramatic activity in Spain until the second half of the 15th century. But from the 1490s onwards Madrid, Seville, Salamanca, Valencia, Toledo and many other towns are known to have had plays. The whole Spanish scene is surveyed with a wealth of detail, particularly relating to dramatic presentation, by Shergold (1967). A great deal of music and varied musical effects were involved; neither has been comprehensively studied (see, however, Salazar, 1938, and Chase, 1939).
The most striking features of the Spanish scene are: the survival of a fair number of ecclesiastical vernacular plays (many, it seems, by foreign hands) associated with church and liturgy; a rich, well-documented tradition of dramatic pageantry (as distinct from plays proper) associated with the processions of Corpus Christi; the absence of anything resembling the French and English mystery cycles; and a developing tradition of religious moralities, culminating in the autos sacramentales of the late 16th and 17th centuries, celebrating the mystery of the Eucharist and performed on Corpus Christi Day (see Auto).
The earliest surviving play in the vernacular is the incomplete Auto de los Reyes Magos of the late 12th century. It is different in form and spirit from liturgical plays on the same subject: the lively realistic spoken dialogues of the three astronomers break off in a scene where the traditional gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh are used to test, not to celebrate, the divinity of the infant Christ (Sturdevant, 1927/R). The fragment has no music.
After this play there is a long gap in the evidence, conceivably a break in tradition, the only exceptions being one or two isolated plays, such as the St Mary Magdalen play of 14th-century Mallorca. The earliest plays about which we have musical information are autos, one-act plays of the late 15th century. Unusually, by comparison with other countries, they are mostly by named authors. Gómez Manrique’s Representacion del nacimiento de Nuestro Senor was written between 1467 and 1481 for the convent of Calabazanos. At the end the nuns sing a cradle song in chorus to what may possibly be a popular tune. At the turn of the century plays were written by several individuals of distinguished musical talent, of whom the first and best was Juan del Encina. Half a dozen of his plays were first published in 1496, having been already performed in the courtly chapel of his patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Alba. Later works were performed at the court of the Catholic Monarchs and perhaps elsewhere. The first six are little more than dialogues between mock-realistic shepherds speaking an anti-literary peasant brogue. The two earliest are Nativity eglogas, followed by two Easter ones and then two that are carnivalesque. These Nativity and Easter playlets combine motifs from liturgical plays (Visitatio sepulchri and Peregrinus) with autobiographical and/or secular material – the three Marys are replaced by two hermits and at the sepulchre they meet not only an angel but also St Veronica, who shows them her miraculous handkerchief. The rumbustious behaviour, crude jokes, yet naively reverent attitude of some of these personages recall aspects of the English mystery cycles. The next half-dozen introduce other figures such as a squire who falls in love with a peasant girl, peasants who are corrupted by the courtly life, a hermit who is seduced by a nymph, students who ‘rag’ two peasants, and finally, courtly lovers set against comic peasants, bawds, go-betweens and Venus herself. All but two of Encina’s eglogas, to judge from the printed texts, ended with the singing of a villancico, no doubt composed by Encina himself. Four such villancicos have survived (Cancionero musical de Palacio, ed. H. Anglès, nos.165, 167 and 174; Cancionero musical de Segovia, f.207v: Gran gasajo siento yo – ex.23, transcr. J.A. Sage). These are typical villancicos of the period: four-part refrain songs of virelai pattern, three being more popular in type and no.167 more courtly. The villancicos for eglogas VIII and XIV, and perhaps others, were accompanied by dancing. As Encina’s technique developed, the villancico was integrated more closely into the structure of the play.
‘I
feel a great joy.
Hey! Ho!’
‘So do I, by my faith!
Ho! Ha!
For He who gave us life
has been born to save us.
Ho! Ha! Hey! Ho!
This night he was born.’
Encina’s contemporary Lucas Fernandez was also a playwright, as well as maestro de capilla of Salamanca Cathedral from 1498. In 1514 he published Farsas y églogas, plays after Encina’s manner, and with them a pastoral dialogue sung perhaps throughout to the same tune. His Auto de la Pasión (1514) contains a planctus of the Blessed Virgin as well as the final villancico. The Portuguese dramatist Gil Vicente, highly talented in his own right, may have followed Encina in some of his plays: he too wrote courtly-popular pieces for royalty, and versions of his plays printed later in the 16th century suggest that several were performed in chapel at Christmas Matins. But the courtliness of these playwrights must not be exaggerated. The so-called Mystery of Elche, in Catalan, on the Assumption of the Virgin, a ‘semi-popular’ religious drama still performed each August at Elche, is provided with music throughout. The music, formerly thought to be by Encina and his contemporaries (NOHM, iv, 1968, p.803), is of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Medieval drama, §III, 3: Vernacular drama: The main traditions
There was no neat end to the Middle Ages or to its drama. Some traditions persisted, others were suppressed, others died a natural death. In Protestant countries, such as England, traditional religious drama was discouraged and eventually eradicated by the reformers (Gardiner, 1946); in Spain, on the other hand, not only vernacular religious plays but some liturgical plays (e.g. the Song of the Sibyl) continued strongly for centuries – in some cases right through to the 20th century (Shergold, 1967).
The ‘drama’ of courts (ceremonies, entertainments and plays) was often sumptuous, and richly provided with music. The dramatic events that could be supported and embellished with music included (to give them their English names) mummings, masks and disguisings, royal entries, tournaments and interludes. The mumming (Fr. momerie; Sp. momo etc.) consisted simply of a visit by masked, and perhaps originally silent, dice players to someone’s house (e.g. Henry VIII, with a band of courtiers pretending to be shepherds, visited Wolsey in 1536); drum and fife were the usual accompaniment. The mask (masque; It. mascherata etc.), clearly indigenous in northern Europe but influenced by Italian custom, had as its centrepiece a dance of courtly persons with music played by professionals on loud (haut) instruments. In the more complex masks, in early Tudor England often called ‘disguisings’, the courtly dancers were wheeled into the hall on an elaborate pageant-car, on which instrumentalists and singers might be stationed (Stevens, 1961, 2/1979, chap.11). Representative pageants were a feature, too, of elaborate court banquets in other parts of Europe (Shergold, 1967, chap.5): in Paris (1389) the city of Troy, on wheels, was attacked by a tentful of Greeks, also on wheels (Loomis, 1958). The function of music on such gaudy royal occasions was essentially to draw attention to the spectacle, and to be in itself something worth seeing (musicians were appropriately disguised). The celebrated Feast of the Pheasant (Lille, 1454) had elaborate musical-culinary effects, including 28 musicians in a pie (see ReeseMR). The long and detailed descriptions of festivities for Cosimo I de’ Medici’s marriage (Florence, 1539) show that the musical offerings could be worthwhile in themselves as well as spectacular: as the bride entered the city ‘a madrigal by Francesco Corteccia was sung in eight parts by a chorus of 24 voices accompanied by 4 cornettos and 4 trombones, all placed on the top of the gate’ (Dent, 1968). Royal entries such as this were a familiar part of the European scene (see Kernodle, 1944); music there had the same functions, part-visual and part-aural, as in indoor festivities. The English interlude (similar to, if not derived from, the Spanish entremés and the French entremet) probably derived its name and nature from being a ‘playing’ (ludus) between (inter) other things, such as the courses of a banquet. In Italy the acts of spoken drama were separated by intermedi, ‘mainly tableaux vivants and dumb-shows, with or without dances’ (Dent). Not only the terminology but the events themselves were variable and multiform. The invisible, hidden musicians of the intermedi are more reminiscent of the English mask or disguising than of the interlude. (See Intermedio and Masque.)
In France, besides moralités, there was a more clearly defined comic dramatic tradition, in the farses and sotties. Secular drama in France was comprehensively surveyed in detail by Brown (1963), who listed over 400 known theatrical chansons and printed from various sources the music of 60. He distinguished two main types of chanson used in plays – the chanson musicale (in the main literary and musical tradition) and the chanson rustique (originating as a single line of melody). Music is, again, associated with low life, the pleasures of the tavern and a lack of moral firmness. Other forms of ‘popular’ or municipal dramatic activity (they cannot properly be called plays) included: in England, civic mummings (e.g. at Kennington, 1377, ‘for the disport of the yong Prince Richard’ – 130 citizens, disguised, accompanied by minstrels; see Wickham, 1959); in Italy, the Carnivals of the seasons before Lent and after 1 May (Calendimaggio), involving the singing and dancing of Canti carnascialeschi and torchlight processions with decorated pageants (carri) of maskers (ReeseMR, pp.167ff); and in France, the festivities of the sociétés joyeuses – ‘play-acting societies’ (Brown) such as the Enfants-sans-Souci of Paris, the Bazochiens (law clerks of Paris) and the Infanterie of Dijon (see Brown for a detailed description of the ‘mardi gras’ festival, i.e. carnival fête, put on by the Abbaye des Conards of Rouen).
Finally, there developed at the end of the Middle Ages, particularly in Germany, an ‘educational’ drama, the Schuldrama. Under the influence of humanism, with its renewed emphasis on classical rhetoric (the mastery of the art of communication through words), a practical dramatic training in the power of language was grafted on to an already strong medieval tradition of debate, as a mode of education, as well as of business and entertainment. ‘The subjects treated, both by Protestants and Catholics, were designed for moral edification and derived from the Old Testament and from classical history’ (Dent). The plays commonly ended with a Latin chorus, in appropriate metre, which might be danced as well as sung. The straightforward melodies, in the style of chorales, were later harmonized in an equally straightforward style (see Liliencron, 1890, with musical examples). The composer Johann Walter (i), associate of Luther and Kantor of the town of Torgau from 1526, wrote music for such plays.
liturgical drama: general studies
liturgical drama and latin plays: special studies and editions
plays of sponsus, agnes, the fall of adam; adam de la halle
ES (‘Liturgico, Dramma’, G. Frank)
La MusicaE (‘Teatro religioso’, S. Corbin)
MGG1 (‘Liturgische Dramen’, W. Lipphardt)
PirroHM
ReeseMR
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H. Anz: Die lateinischen Magierspiele (Leipzig, 1905)
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H.J.W. Tillyard, trans.: The Plays of Roswitha (London, 1923)
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J.B. Fuller, ed.: Hilarii versus et ludi (New York, 1929)
F. Liuzzi: ‘L’espressione musicale nel dramma liturgico’, Studi medievali, new ser., ii (1929), 74–109
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H. Sievers: Die lateinischen Osterspiele der Stiftskirche St Blasius zu Braunschweig (Wolfenbüttel, 1936)
E.A. Wright: The Dissemination of the Liturgical Drama in France (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1936)
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M.H. Marshall: ‘The Dramatic Traditions Established by the Liturgical Plays’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, lvi (1941), 962–91
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W. Lipphardt: Die Weisen der lateinischen Osterspiele des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Kassel, 1948)
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M.H. Marshall: ‘Aesthetic Values of the Liturgical Drama’, English Institute Essays 1950, 89–115
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S. Corbin: ‘Le manuscript 201 d’Orléans: drames liturgiques dits de Fleury’, Romania, lxxiv (1953), 1–43
J. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘A Dutch Easter Play’, MD, vii (1953), 15–37
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J. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘Das Nürnberger Osterspiel’, Festschrift Joseph Schmidt-Görg zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. D. Weise (Bonn, 1957), 303–8
P. Damilano: ‘Il dramma liturgico in Italia’, Musica sacra [Milan], 2nd ser., iii (1958), 130
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S. Corbin: ‘Le Jeu de Daniel à l’abbaye de Royaumont’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, iii (1960), 373–5
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H. Wagenaar-Nolthenius: ‘Sur la construction musicale du drame liturgique’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, iii (1960), 449–56
R. Weakland: ‘The Rhythmic Modes and Medieval Latin Drama’, JAMS, xiv (1961), 131–46
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E.A. Bowles: ‘Musical Instruments in the Medieval Corpus Christi Procession’, JAMS, xvii (1964), 251–60
W. Elders: ‘Gregorianisches in liturgischen Dramen der Hs. Orléans 201’, AcM, xxxvi (1964), 169–77
W.L. Smoldon, ed.: Visitatio sepulchri (Oxford, 1964, 2/1967) [performing edn]
T. Bailey: The Fleury Play of Herod (Toronto, 1965)
M. Bernard: ‘L’officium stellae nivernais’, RdM, li (1965), 52–65
W.L. Smoldon: ‘Medieval Lyrical Melody and the Latin Church Dramas’, MQ, li (1965), 507–17
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R. Brandel: ‘Some Unifying Devices in the Religious Music Drama of the Middle Ages’, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R), 40–55
J. Chailley: ‘Du drame liturgique aux prophètes de Notre-Dame-la-Grande’, Mélanges offerts à René Crozet, ed. P. Gallais and Y.-J. Riou (Poitiers, 1966), 835–41
B. Stäblein: ‘Zur Musik des Ludus de Antichristo’, Zum 70. Geburtstag von Joseph Müller-Blattau, ed. C.-H. Mahling (Kassel, 1966), 312–27
W.L. Smoldon, ed.: Planctus Mariae (Oxford, 1966) [performing edn]
H. Wagenaar-Nolthenius: ‘Der Planctus Iudei und der Gesang jüdischer Märtyrer in Blois anno 1171’, Mélanges offerts à René Crozet, ed. P. Gallais and Y.-J. Riou (Poitiers, 1966), 881–5
H. de Boor: Die Textgeschichte der lateinischen Osterfeiern (Tübingen, 1967)
J. Smits van Waesberghe and others: ‘Liturgical and Secular Elements in Medieval Liturgical Drama’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 271–83
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W.L. Smoldon, ed.: ‘The Melodies of the Medieval Church-Drama and their Significance’, Comparative Drama, ii (1968), 185–209
J.E. Stevens: ‘Music in some Early Medieval Plays’, Studies in the Arts, ed. F. Warner (Oxford, 1968), 21–40
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P. Dronke: Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry 1000–1150 (Oxford, 1970) [with edn of Hildegard of Bingen: Ordo virtutum, and edn by I.D. Bent of planctus of Abelard and songs of Hildegard]
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O.B. Hardison: ‘Gregorian Easter Vespers and Early Liturgical Drama’, The Medieval Drama and its Claudelian Revival, ed. E.C. Dunn, T. Fotitch and B.M Peebles (Washington DC, 1970), 27–40
H. Homeyer, ed.: Hrotsvitha: Opera (Paderborn, 1970)
M.D. Moore: The Visitatio Sepulchri of the Medieval Church (diss., U. of Rochester, NY, 1970)
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C.E. Elder: ‘Eine noch unbekannte Osterfeier aus St. Nikola in Passau’, Festschrift Bernhard Bischoff, ed. J. Autenrieth and F. Brunhölz (Stuttgart, 1971), 449–56
W. Lipphardt: ‘Die Mainzer Visitatio Sepulchri’, Medievalia Litteraria: Festschrift für Helmut de Boor (Munich, 1971), 177–92
W.G. Stryker: ‘An Easter Play in Finland’, Studies in Medieval, Renaissance, American Literature, ed. B.F. Colquitt (Fort Worth, TX, 1971), 45–52, 197–8
F. Collins: The Production of Medieval Church Music-Drama (Charlottesville, VA, 1972)
D.N. Dumville: ‘Liturgical Drama and Panegyric Responsory from the Eighth Century’, Journal of Theological Studies, new ser., xxiii (1972), 374–406
W. Lipphardt: ‘Die Visitatio Sepulchri (III. Stufe) von Gernrode’, Daphnis, i (1972), 1–14
W.L. Smoldon: ‘The Origins of the Quem quaeritis and the Easter Sepulchre Music-Drama, as Demonstrated by their Musical Settings’, The Medieval Drama: Binghamton, NY, 1969, ed. S. Sticca (Albany, NY, 1972), 121–54
C.C. Flanigan: ‘The Roman Rite and the Origins of the Liturgical Drama’, University of Toronto Quarterly, xliii (1973–4), 263–84
C.C. Flanigan: ‘The Liturgical Context of the Quem queritis Trope’, Comparative Drama, viii (1974), 45–62
D.H. Ogden: ‘The Use of Architectural Space in Medieval Music-Drama’, Comparative Drama, viii (1974), 63–76
D. Dolan: Le drame liturgique de Pâques en Normandie et en Angleterre au Moyen Age (Paris, 1975)
D.G. Hughes: ‘The First Magdalene Lament of the Tours Easter Play’, JAMS, xxix (1976), 276–83
T. McGee: ‘The Liturgical Placements of the Quem quaeritis Dialogue’, JAMS, xxix (1976), 1–29
The Fleury Playbook: Kalamazoo, MI, 1980
D. Bjork: ‘On the Dissemination of “Quem quaeritis” and the “Visitatio sepulchri” and the Chronology of their Early Sources’, Comparative Drama, xiv/1 (1980), 46–69
W. Coleman, ed.: Philippe de Mézières’ Campaign for the Feast of Mary’s Presentation (Toronto, 1981)
P. Sheingorn: The Easter Sepulchre in England (Kalamazoo, MI, 1987)
M. Egan-Buffet and A.J. Fletcher: ‘The Dublin “Visitatio Sepulcri” Play’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, xc (1990), 159–241
D.H. Ogden: ‘Costumes and Vestments for the Medieval Music Drama’, Material Culture and Medieval Drama, ed. C. Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999), 17–57
O. Schönemann: Der Sündenfall und Marienklage: zwei niederdeutsche Schauspiele (Hanover, 1855)
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F.J. Tanquerey: Plaintes de la Vierge en anglo-français (Paris, 1921)
W. Lipphardt: ‘Marienklage und Liturgie’, Jb für Liturgiewissenschaft, xii (1932), 198–205
W. Lipphardt: ‘Altdeutsche Marienklagen’, Die Singgemeinde, ix (1932–33), 65–79
W. Lipphardt: ‘Studien zu den Marienklagen’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, lviii (1934), 390–444
A. Geering: ‘Die Nibelungenmelodie in der Trierer Marienklage’, IMSCR IV: Basle 1949, 118–21
W. Irtenkauf and H. Eggers: ‘Die “Donaueschinger Marienklage”: eine neue wohl aus Österreich stammende Quelle für die Marienklagen und Magdalenszenen des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Carinthia I, cxlviii (1958), 359–82
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P. Studer, ed.: Le mystère d’Adam (Manchester, 1918)
F. Liuzzi: ‘Drammi musicali dei secoli XI–XIV, i: le vergine savie e le vergine folli’, Studi medievali, new ser., iii (1930), 82–109
A. Jeanroy and T. Gérold, eds.: Le jeu de Sainte Agnès, drame provençal du XIVe siècle (Paris, 1931)
G. Cohen and J. Chailley, eds.: Le Jeu d’Adam et d’Eve, mystère du XIIe siècle (Paris, 1936, 10/1948)
F. Liuzzi: ‘Il dramma delle vergini savie e delle vergine folli e l’uffizio liturgico orientale di S. Agata’, Congresso nazionale di studi romani IV: Rome 1935, ed. G. Galassi Paluzzi (Rome, 1938), 587–91
O. Ursprung: ‘Das Sponsus-Spiel’, AMf, iii (1938), 80–95, 180–92
J.W. Doyle, trans.: Adam, a Play (Sydney, 1948)
J. Chailley: ‘La nature musicale du Jeu Robin et Marion’, Mélanges d’histoire du théâtre du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance offerts à Gustave Cohen (Paris, 1950), 111–17
E. Hoepffner: ‘Les intermèdes musicaux dans le jeu provençal de Sainte-Agnes’, Mélanges d’histoire du théâtre du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance offerts à Gustave Cohen (Paris, 1950), 97–104
L.P. Thomas, ed.: Le ‘Sponsus’ (mystère des vierges sages et des vierges folles) (Paris, 1951) [see also review by J. Chailley, RBM, vi (1952), 153]
K. Varty, ed.: Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion (London, 1960)
F. Gennrich, ed.: Adam de la Halle: Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion – Li Rondel Adam (Frankfurt, 1962)
P. Aebischer, ed.: Le mystère d’Adam (Ordo representacionis Ade) (Geneva and Paris, 1963)
D’A.S. Avalle and R. Monterosso, eds.: Sponsus: dramma delle vergini prudenti e delle vergini stolte (Milan, 1965) [with 6 facs.]
W. Noomen: ‘Le Jeu d’Adam: étude descriptive et analytique’, Romania, lxxxix (1968), 145–93
L. Sletsjoe, ed.: Le mystère d’Adam: édition diplomatique accompagnée d’une reproduction photographique du manuscrit de Tours (Paris, 1968)
W. Noomen, ed.: Le jeu d’Adam (Paris, 1971)
W.L. Smoldon, ed.: Sponsus/The Bridegroom: an Acting version of an 11th-Century Mystère (London, 1972)
L.R. Muir: Liturgy and Drama in the Anglo-Norman Adam (Oxford, 1973)
T. Sharp: Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry (Coventry, 1825/R)
F.J. Furnivall, ed.: The Digby Mysteries (London, 1882/R, repr. 1896/R as The Digby Plays)
L.T. Smith, ed.: York Plays (Oxford, 1885/R)
H. Craig, ed.: Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (London, 1902, 2/1957)
J.K. Moore: ‘The Tradition of Angelic Singing in the English Drama’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, xxii (1923), 89–99
E. Beuscher: Die Gesangseinlagen in den englischen Mysterien (Münster, 1930)
F. Collins: ‘Music in the Craft Cycles’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xlvii (1932), 613–21
J.R. Moore: ‘Miracle Plays, Minstrels and Jigs’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xlviii (1933), 942ff
V. Shull: ‘Clerical Drama in Lincoln Cathedral, 1318–1561’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, lii (1937), 946–66
H.C. Gardiner: Mysteries’ End: an Investigation into the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven, CT, 1946)
W.L. Hildburgh: ‘English Alabaster Carvings as Records of the Medieval Religious Drama’, Archaeologia, xciii (1949), 51–101
C.F. Hoffmann: ‘The Source of the Words of the Music in York 46’, Modern Language Notes, lxv (1950), 236–9
N.C. Carpenter: ‘Music in the Secunda Pastorum’, Speculum, xxvi (1951), 696–700
H. Craig: English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1955)
J.P. Cutts: ‘The Second Coventry Carol and a Note on “The Maydes Metamorphosis”’, RN, x (1957), 3–8
R. Southern: The Medieval Theatre in the Round: a Study of the Staging of The Castle of Perseverance and Related Matters (London, 1957, 2/1975)
J. Stevens: ‘Music in Mediaeval Drama’, PRMA, lxxxiv (1957–8), 81–95
A.C. Cawley, ed.: The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester, 1958)
G. Wickham: Early English Stages 1300 to 1660 (London, 1959–72, 2/1980–81)
M. Rose, ed.: The Wakefield Mystery Plays (London, 1961/R)
M.D. Anderson: Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge, 1963)
J. Gassner, ed.: Medieval and Tudor Drama (New York, 1963/R)
N.C. Carpenter: ‘Music in the Chester Plays’, Papers on English Language and Literature, i (1965), 195–216
V.A. Kolve: The Play called Corpus Christi (London, 1966)
R. Longsworth: The Cornish Ordinalia: Religion and Dramaturgy (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1967)
N.C. Carpenter: ‘Music in the English Mystery Plays’, Music in English Renaissance Drama, ed. J.H. Long (Lexington, KY, 1968), 1–31
R.T. Meyer: ‘Liturgical Background of Medieval Cornish Drama’, Trivium, iii (1968), 48–58
M. Harris, trans.: The Cornish Ordinalia (Washington DC, 1969)
N. Davis, ed.: Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments (London, 1970) [music of Shrewsbury frags. ed. F.Ll. Harrison]
C. Wall: ‘York Pageant XLVI and its Music’, Speculum, xlvi (1971), 689–712 [music ed. R. Steiner]
P.J. Houle: The English Morality and Related Drama: a Bibliographical Survey (Hamden, CT, 1972)
J. Taylor and A.H. Nelson, eds.: Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual (Chicago, 1972)
G. Wickham: ‘The Staging of Saint Plays in England’, The Medieval Drama: Binghamton 1969, ed. S. Sticca (Albany, NY, 1972), 99–119
J. Dutka: ‘Music and the English Mystery Plays’, Comparative Drama, vii (1973), 135–49
R. Rastall, ed.: Two Coventry Carols (Newton Abbot, 1973)
A.C. Cawley and others, eds.: Leeds Texts and Monographs: Medieval Drama Facsimiles (Leeds, 1973–)
J. Dutka: ‘Mysteries, Minstrels and Music’, Comparative Drama, viii (1974), 112–24
S.J. Kahrl: Traditions of Medieval English Drama (London, 1974)
A.H. Nelson: The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago, 1974)
R.M. Lumiansky and D. Mills, eds.: The Chester Mystery Cycle (London, 1974–86)
R. Potter: The English Morality Play (London, 1975)
S. Rankin: ‘Shrewsbury School Manuscript VI: a Medieval Part Book?’, PRMA, cii (1975–6), 129–44
M. Harris, trans.: The Life of Meriasek: a Medieval Cornish Miracle Play (Washington DC, 1977)
Records of Early English Drama (Toronto, 1979–) [esp. Coventry (1981)]
M.R. Kelley: Flamboyant Drama: a Study of ‘The Castle of Perseverance’, ‘Mankind’ and ‘Wisdom’ (Carbondale, IL, 1979)
P. Neuss: ‘The Staging of the “Creacion of the World”’, Theatre Notebook, xxxiii (1979), 116–25
J. Bakere: The Cornish Ordinalia: a Critical Study (Cardiff, 1980)
J. Dutka: Music in the English Mystery Plays (Kalamazoo, MI, 1980)
R.W. Ingram, ed.: Coventry, Records of Early English Drama, iii (Toronto, 1981)
D. Baker, J. Murphy and L. Hall, eds.: The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E. Museo 160 (Oxford, 1982)
R. Beadle, ed.: The York Plays (London, 1982)
W.A. Davenport: Fifteenth-Century English Drama: the Early Moral Plays and their Literary Relations (Cambridge and Totowa, NJ, 1982)
A.C. Cawley and others: The Revels History of Drama in English, i: Medieval Drama (London, 1983)
P. Neuss, ed. and trans.: The Creacion of the World: a Critical Edition and Translation (New York, 1983)
R. Rastall: ‘Alle hefne makyth melody’, Aspects of Early English Drama, ed. P. Neuss (Cambridge, 1983), 1–12
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M. Stevens and A.C. Cawley, eds.: The Towneley Plays (Oxford, 1994)
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G. Paris and U. Robert, eds.: Les Miracles de Notre Dame (Paris, 1876–93)
L. Petit de Julleville: Histoire du théâtre en France: les mystères (Paris, 1880)
P. le Verdier, ed.: Mystère de l’Incarnation et Nativité de Notre Sauveur et Rédempteur Jésus-Christ (Rouen, 1884–6)
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G. Frank: The Medieval French Drama (Oxford, 1954)
A. and R. Bossuat: Deux moralités inédites (Paris, 1955)
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E. Konigson: La représentation d’un mystère de la Passion à Valenciennes en 1547 (Paris, 1969)
A. Pulega: Ludi e spettacoli nel Medioevo: i tornei di dame (Milan, 1970)
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P. Matarasso, trans.: Aucassin and Nicolette, and Other Tales (Harmondsworth, 1971)
O. Jodogne: ‘Le théâtre français du Moyen Age: recherches sur l'aspect dramatique des textes’, The Medieval Drama: Binghamton 1969, ed. S. Sticca (Albany, NY, 1972), 1–21
N. Wilkins: ‘Music in the 14th-Century Miracles de Nostre Dame’, MD, xxviii (1974), 39–75
J.-C. Aubailly: Le théâtre médiéval profane et comique (Paris, 1975)
E. Konigson: L’espace théâtral médiéval (Paris, 1975)
K. Schoell: Das komische Theater des französischen Mittelalters (Munich, 1975)
J.-C. Aubailly: Le monologue, le dialogue et la sottie (Paris, 1976)
W. Helmich: Die Allegorie im französischen Theater des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1976)
G.A. Runnalls: ‘Medieval French Drama: a Review of Recent Scholarship Part I’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, xxi (1978), 83–90
M. Accarie: Le théâtre sacré de la fin du Moyen Age: étude sur le sens moral de la Passion de Jean Michel (Geneva, 1979)
G.A. Runnalls: ‘Medieval French Drama: a Review of Recent Scholarship Parts IB and IC: Studies of Sub-Sections of the Fields and of Individual Plays’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, xxii (1979), 111–36
H. Arden: Fools’ Plays: a Study of Satire in the Sottie (Cambridge, 1980)
A. Hindley: ‘Medieval French Drama: a Review of Recent Scholarship Part II: Comic Drama’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, xxiii (1980), 93–126
P. Durbin and L.R. Muir, eds.: The Passion de Semur (Leeds, 1981)
L.R. Muir: Literature and Society in Medieval France: the Mirror and the Image, 1100–1500 (London and New York, 1985)
A.E. Knight: ‘Manuscript Painting and Play Production: Evidence from Processional Plays at Lille’, The EDAM Newsletter, ix/1 (1986), 1–5
A.E. Knight: ‘From Model to Problem: the Development of the Hero in the French Morality Play’, Everyman and Company, ed. D. Gilman (New York, 1989), 75–89
A.E. Knight: ‘France’, The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama, ed. E. Simon (Cambridge, 1991), 151–68
C. Sponsler: ‘Festive Profit and Ideological Production: “Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas”’, Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 66–79
A.E. Knight: ‘The Stage as Context: Two Late Medieval French Susanna Plays’, The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. A.E. Knight (Cambridge, 1997), 201–16
J.-P. Bordier: Le Jeu de la Passion: le message chrétien et le théâtre français (XIIIe–XVIe) (Paris, 1998)
P. Butterworth: ‘Jean Fouquet's “The Martyrdom of St Apollonia” and “The Rape of the Sabine Women” as Iconographical Evidence of Medieval Theatre Practice’, Essays in Honour of Peter Meredith, ed. C. Batt (Leeds, 1998), 55–67
N. Henrard: Le théâtre religieux médiéval en langue d’oc (Geneva, 1998)
C. Mazouer: Le théâtre français du Moyen Age (Paris, 1998)
L. Muir: ‘Résurrection des Mystères: Medieval Drama in Modern France’, Essays in Honour of Peter Meredith, ed. C. Batt (Leeds, 1998), 235–47
M. Rousse: ‘Jonglerie dans le théâtre des mystères’, Les genres insérés dans le théâtre, ed. A. Sancier and P. Servet (Lyon, 1998), 13–29
G.A. Runnalls: Bibliographie des miracles et mystères français (forthcoming)
F.J. Mone: Altteutsche Schauspiele (Quedlinberg and Leipzig, 1841)
F.J. Mone: Schauspiele des Mittelalters (Karlsruhe, 1846, 2/1852)
O. Schönemann: Der Sündenfall und Marienklage: zwei niederdeutsche Schauspiele (Hanover, 1855)
K. Weinhold: Weihnachtsspiele und Lieder aus Süddeutschland und Schlesien (Graz, 1870)
P. Bohn: ‘Theophilus: niederdeutsches Schauspiel aus einer Handschrift des 15. Jahrhunderts der Trierischen Stadtbibliothek’, MMg, ix (1877), 3–4, 24–5
G. Milchsack: Heidelberger Passionsspiel (Tübingen, 1880)
G. Milchsack: Egerer Fronleichnamsspiel (Tübingen, 1881)
K.F. Kummer: Sechs altdeutsche Mysterien (Vienna, 1882)
R. Froning: Frankfurter Chroniken und annalistiche Aufzeichnungen des Mittelalters, i (Frankfurt, 1884) [contains Frankfurter Dirigier-rolle]
R. Brandstetter: ‘Musik und Gesang bei den Luzerner Osterspielen’, Der Geschichtsfreund, xl (1885), 145–68
J.E. Wackernell: Altdeutsche Passionsspiele aus Tirol (Graz, 1897/R)
G. Duriez: La théologie dans le drame religieux en Allemagne au Moyen Age (Paris, 1914)
E. Refardt: ‘Die Musik der Basler Volksschauspiele des 16. Jahrhunderts’, AMw, iii (1921), 199–219
M.J. Rudwin: A Historical and Bibliographical Survey of the German Religious Drama (Pittsburgh, 1924)
W. Stammler: Das Religiöse Drama im deutsche Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1925)
A. Orel: ‘Die Weisen im “Wiener Passionsspiel” aus dem 13. Jahrhundert’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Wien, vi (1926), 72 [with transcrs]
O. Sengpiel: Die Bedeutung der Prozession für das geistliche Spiel des Mittelalters in Deutschland (Breslau, 1932/R)
K. Dreimüller: Die Musik des Alsfelder Passionsspiels (Vienna, 1936)
J. Müller-Blattau: Germanisches Erbe in deutscher Tonkunst (Berlin, 1938)
H.-H. Breuer: Das mittelniederdeutsche Osnabrücker Osterspiel: der Ursprung des Osterspiels und die Prozession (Osnabrück, 1939)
H. Osthoff: ‘Deutsche Liedweisen und Wechselgesänge im mittelalterlichen Drama’, AMf, vii (1942), 65–81
M.B. Evans: The Passion Play of Lucerne: an Historical and Critical Introduction (New York, 1943)
H. Osthoff: Die Musik im Drama des deutschen Mittelalters: Quellen und Forschungsziele (Kassel, 1943/R)
G.O. Arlt: ‘The Vocal Music of the Lucerne Passion Play, 1583 and 1597’, BAMS, viii (1945), 24–5
W.F. Michael: Die geistlichen Prozessionsspiele in Deutschland (Baltimore, 1947)
K. Dreimüller: ‘Die Musik im geistlichen Spiel des späten deutschen Mittelalters: dargestellt am Alsfelder Passionspiel’, KJb, xxxiv (1950), 27–34
K.G. Fellerer: ‘Die Nottulner Osterfeier’, Westfalia sacra, ii (1950), 215–49
H. Kettering: ‘Die Essener Osterfeier’, KJb, xxxvi (1952), 7–13
L. Kaff: Mittelalterliche Oster- und Passionsspiele aus Oberösterreich im Spiegel musikwissenschaftlicher Betrachtung (Linz, 1956)
W. Lipphardt: ‘Das hessische Weihnachtspiel’, Convivium symbolicum, ii (1958), 23, 66
M.M. Butler: Hrotsvitha: the Theatricality of her Plays (New York, 1960)
R. Steinbach: Die deutschen Oster- und Passionsspiele des Mittelalters (Cologne, 1960)
R. Meier, ed.: Das Innsbrucker Osterspiel – das Osterspiel von Muri (Stuttgart, 1963)
W.F. Michael: Frühformen der deutschen Bühne (Berlin, 1963)
W.L. Boletta: The Role of Music in Medieval German Drama: Easter Plays and Passion Plays (diss., Vanderbilt U., 1967)
W.F. Michael: Das deutsche Drama des Mittelalters (Berlin and New York, 1971)
W. Michael: ‘Tradition and Originality in the Medieval Drama in Germany’, The Medieval Drama: Binghamton 1969, ed. S. Sticca (Albany, NJ, 1972), 23–37
K.M. Wilson, ed.: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Rara Avis in Saxonia? (Ann Arbor, 1987)
C.A. Brown: ‘The ‘Susanna’ Drama and the German Reformation’, Everyman and Company, ed. D. Gilman (New York, 1989), 129–53
J.M. Pastré: ‘“Fastnachtspiel” et récit bref: l'interférence de deux genres littéraires en Allemagne aux 15e et 16e siècles’, Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 223–32
J.E. Tailby: ‘Lucerne Revisited: Facts and Questions’, Essays in Honour of Peter Meredith, ed. C. Batt (Leeds, 1998), 347–58
P. Colomb de Batines: Bibliografia delle antiche rappresentazioni italiane sacre e profane stampate nei secoli XV e XVI (Florence, 1852/R)
A. d’Ancona: Sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI (Florence, 1872)
A. d’Ancona: Origini del teatro italiano (Florence, 1877, 2/1891)
V. de Bartholomaeis: Le origini della poesia drammatica italiana (Bologna, 1924, 2/1952)
J.S. Kennard: The Italian Theatre, i (New York, 1932/R)
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V. de Bartholomaeis, ed.: Laude drammatiche e rappresentazioni sacre (Florence, 1943/R)
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C. Musumarra: La sacra rappresentazione della natività nella tradizione italiana (Florence, 1957)
A. Cioni: Bibliografia delle sacre rappresentazioni (Florence, 1961)
A. Stäuble: La commedia umanistica del Quattrocento (Florence, 1968)
E. Faccioli: Il teatro italiano, i (Turin, 1975)
R. Edwards: The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama (Berkeley, 1977)
L. Zorzi: Il teatro e la città: saggi sulla scena italiana (Turin, 1977)
S. Mamone: Il teatro nella Firenze medicea (Milan, 1981)
K. Falvey: ‘Italian Vernacular Religious Drama of the Fourteenth through the Sixteenth Centuries: a Selected Bibliography on the “Lauda drammatica” and the “Sacra rappresentazione”’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, xxvi (1983), 125–44
D. Radcliff-Umstead: ‘The Miraculous in the Italian “Sacra Rappresentazione”’, Everyman and Company, ed. D. Gilman (New York, 1989), 91–109
M. Cañete and F.A. Barbieri, eds.: Teatro completo de Juan del Encina (Madrid, 1893/R)
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F. Pedrell: ‘La Festa d’Elche’, SIMG, ii (1900–01), 203–52
J.M.R. de Alcahalí de Mosquera: La música en Valencia: diccionario biográfico y crítico (Valencia, 1903)
J.P. Wickersham Crawford: Spanish Drama before Lope de Vega (Philadelphia, 1922, 2/1937/R)
L. Fernandez: Farsas y églogas, ed. E. Cotarelo y Mori (Madrid, 1926)
J.B. Trend: The Music of Spanish History to 1600 (London, 1926/R)
W. Sturdevant: The Misterio de los Reyes Magos: its Position in the Development of the Medieval Legend of the Three Kings (Baltimore and Paris, 1927/R)
J.E. Gillet, ed.: ‘Danza del Santisimo Nacimento, a Sixteenth-Century Play by Pedro Suárez de Robles’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xliii (1928), 614–34
H. Corbató: Los misterios del Corpus de Valencia (Berkeley, 1932)
H. Anglès: La música a Catalunya fins al segle XIII, PBC, x (Barcelona, 1935/R)
R.B. Williams: The Staging of Plays in the Spanish Peninsula prior to 1555 (Iowa City, IA, 1935)
A. Salazar: ‘Music in the Primitive Spanish Theatre before Lope de Vega’, PAMS 1938, 94–108
G. Chase: ‘Origins of the Lyric Theater in Spain’, MQ, xxv (1939), 292–305
J. Gillet: ‘The Memorias of Felipe Fernández Vallejo and the History of Early Spanish Drama’, Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York, 1940), 264–80
A.J. Saraiva: Gil Vicente e o fim do teatro medieval (Lisbon, 1942, 3/1970/R)
A. Livermore: ‘The Spanish Dramatists and their Use of Music’, ML, xxv (1944), 140–49
G. Diaz Plaja: ‘La Consueta del Rey Asuero’, Boletín de la Real Academia de buenas letras de Barcelona, xxv (1953), 227–45
F.L. Carreter: Teatro medieval: textos integros (Valencia, 1958, 4/1981)
J.-L. Flecniakoska: La formation de “l’auto” religieux en Espagne avant Calderón, 1550–1635 (Montpellier, 1961)
S. Pestana, ed.: Auto de los Reyes Magos: texto castelhano anónimo de século XII (Lisbon, 1965)
J.H. Parker: Gil Vicente (New York, 1967)
N.D. Shergold: A History of the Spanish Stage from Medieval Times until the End of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1967)
H. López Morales: Tradición y creación en los orígenes del teatro castellano (Madrid, 1968)
H. López-Morales, ed.: Égolgas completas de Juan del Enzina (Madrid, 1968)
H.W. Sullivan: Juan del Encina (Boston, 1976)
L. Fothergill-Payne: La alegoría en los autos y farsas anteriores a Calderón (London, 1977)
R. Arias: The Spanish Sacramental Plays (Boston, 1980)
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P. King: ‘The “Festa d'Elx”: Civic Devotion, Display and Identity’, Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 95–109
R. Portillo and M.J. Gomez Lara: ‘Holy Week Performances of the Passion in Spain: Connections with Medieval European Drama’, Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 88–94
R. Potter: ‘The “Auto Da Fé” as Medieval Drama’, Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 110–18
R.E. Surtz: ‘Masks in the Medieval Peninsular Theatre’, Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 80–87
J.E. Moore: ‘The Scapegoat in the Spanish “auto sacramental”’, European Medieval Drama, ii (1998), 301–14
W. Hummelen: Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama 1500–ca.1620 (Assen, 1968)
L. van Kammen: De abele spelen (Amsterdam, 1968)
W. Waterschoot: ‘De Studie van de rederijkers en de Literatuur der zestiende Eeuw sedert 1956’, Spiegel der Letteren, xvi (1974), 240–84
K. Iwema, ed.: ‘Cornelis van Ghistele: “Van Eneas en Dido”, twee amoureuze spelen uit de zestiende eeuw’, Jaarboek ‘De Fonteine’, xxxiii (1982–3), 103–243
H. Van Dijk and others: ‘A Survey of Dutch Drama Before the Renaissance’, Dutch Crossing, xxii (1984), 97–131
R. Strohm: Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford, 1985)
J. Oakshott and E. Strietman: ‘Esmoreit: a Goodly Play of Esmoreit, Prince of Sicily’, Dutch Crossing, xxx (1986), 3–39
D. Gilman: ‘Select Bibliography: Dutch Drama’, Everyman and Company, ed. D. Gilman (New York, 1989), 252–65
W. Hummelen: ‘The Drama of the Dutch Rhetoricians’, ibid., 169–92
E. Strietman: ‘Medieval Drama in Europe: the Low Countries’, The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre, ed. M. Banham (Cambridge, 1988), 644–7
D. Coigneau: ‘“Een vreughdich liet moet ick vermanen”: positie en gebruikswijzen van het rederijkerslied’, Een zoet akkoord, ed. F. Willaert and others (Amsterdam, 1992), 255–67
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J. Cartwright: ‘Forms and Their Uses: the Antwerp “Ommegangen”, 1550–1700’, Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 119–31
M. De Roos: ‘Battles and Bottles: Shrovetide Performances in the Low Countries (c.1350–c.1550)’, ibid., 167–79
W. Hüsken: ‘Civic Patronage of Early Fifteenth-Century Religious Drama in the Low Countries’, Civic Ritual and Drama, ed. A.F. Johnston and W. Hüsken (Amsterdam, 1997), 107–23
W. Hüsken: ‘Politics and Drama: the City of Bruges as Organiser of Drama Competitions’, The Stage as Mirror, ed. A.E. Knight (Cambridge, 1997), 165–87
G. Nijsten: ‘Feasts and Public Spectacle: Late Medieval Drama and Performance in the Low Countries’, ibid., 107–43
J. Cartwright: ‘Modes of Performance at the Antwerp “Haagspel” of 1561’, European Medieval Drama, ii (1998), 223–33
W. Hüsken: ‘Aspects of Staging Cornelis Everaert’, ibid., 235–52
F. Kramer: ‘How to Stage an “Abel Spel”: Reflections on the Theatrical Treatment of Historical Play-Texts’, ibid., 273–88
E. Strietman: ‘Pawns or Prime Movers? The Rhetoricians in the Struggle for Power in the Low Countries’, ibid., 211–22
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E. Strietman: ‘Plays Ancient and Modern: the Use of Classical Material in the Sixteenth-Century Drama of the Low Countries’, European Medieval Drama, iii (forthcoming)
L. Søndergaard: ‘Two Carnival Plays from Late-Medieval Denmark’, Festive Drama, ed. M. Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 203–11
G.D. Caie: ‘Unfaithful Wives and Weeping Bitches: “Den utro hustro”’, European Medieval Drama, ii (1998), 289–300
G. Milchsack: Egerer Fronleichnamsspiel (Tübingen, 1881)
J. Truhlář: ‘O staročeských dramatech velikonočnich’ [On old Czech Easter plays], Časopis Národního musea, lvi (1891), 3–43
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J. Ernyey and G. Karsai: Deutsche Volksschauspiele aus den Oberungarischen Bergstädten (Budapest, 1938)
F. Oberpfalcer and J. Plavec: Nejstarší české hry divadelní [The oldest Czech play] (Prague, 1941)
J. Vilikovský: Písemnictví českého středovéku [Czech medieval literature] (Prague, 1948)
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V. Černý: ‘Staročeský Mastičkář’ [The old Czech vendor of ointments], (Prague, 1955)
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A. and E. Mrygoń: Bibliografia polskiego piśmiennictwa muzykologicznego [A bibliography of Polish musicological literature] (Warsaw, 1972)
B. Bartkowski: ‘Visitatio sepulchri w Polskich przekazach średniowiecznych’ [Visitatio sepulchri in Polish medieval MSS], Musica medii aevi, iv (1973), 129–63
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