Medieval liturgical & vernacular drama

Liturgical drama is the modern label for short sung dialogues that medieval clergy interpolated into the church liturgy from roughly the 10th century onward. They were not "plays" in the modern proscenium sense; they were enacted prayer. Singers in vestments stepped out of choir formation, took on the roles of biblical figures, and returned to their stalls when the scene was over.

The form is the seed of nearly all later Western theatre. By the 13th century, performances had moved out of the choir, into the nave, then onto the church porch, and finally — once the dialogues had grown too long, too loud, and too vernacular for ecclesiastical comfort — into the street.

The earliest surviving Latin dramatic dialogue is the four-line Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae? ("Whom do you seek in the tomb, O followers of Christ?"), preserved in a 10th-century manuscript from the Abbey of Saint Gall and described in the English Regularis Concordia (c. 970).

ANGEL: Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae?
MARYS: Iesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicola.
ANGEL: Non est hic, surrexit sicut praedixerat…

Four lines. One prop (a cloth, standing in for the burial shroud). No costume changes. From this seed grew the Passion plays, the Easter sequences, and — eventually — Shakespeare.

Hildegard von Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, composer, theologian, herbalist, mystic, diplomat, and — in the late 1150s — the author of what is now generally considered the earliest surviving morality play with music: the Ordo Virtutum.

At a moment when most women in religious life had no public voice outside the convent walls, Hildegard wrote unsolicited letters to the pope, the emperor, four kings, and Bernard of Clairvaux. Most of them wrote back. Her surviving 77 chants (collected as the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum) sit at the outer edge of what early monophonic music was thought to do — soaring ranges, irregular phrase lengths, and an audacious theological tenderness.

The Ordo, embedded inside her great theological vision Scivias (1151), is not just a play. It is the dramatisation of her cosmology: the soul as a thing that can be clothed, can grow tired, can be helped up.

The Ordo Virtutum is the earliest extant European morality play — and the only medieval music drama whose text and music both survive in the same composer's hand. It precedes the vernacular morality cycle (The Castle of Perseverance, Everyman) by some two and a half centuries.

The plot: Anima, a human soul, is welcomed by the Virtues. She becomes weary of the weight of bodily life and is lured away by the Devil. After a long absence, she returns wounded; the Virtues sing her back to strength; the Devil is bound. The whole action is sung — except the Devil, who can only strepitus: speak, shout, scoff. Hildegard's theology is explicit: harmony is the proof of being. The Devil cannot sing because he is no longer in tune with creation.

The Rupertsberg nuns almost certainly performed it themselves, possibly at the consecration of their new chapel in 1152. One monk (the play's solitary male role) sang the Devil.

A morality play is an allegorical drama in which abstract qualities — Mercy, Pride, Knowledge, Death — appear on stage as walking, speaking characters and fight for possession of a representative human figure (often called Mankind, Everyman, Humanum Genus, or simply The Soul).

The genre's core innovation is personification as instruction. To learn what humility is, a 14th-century shoemaker watched a woman cross a wooden stage carrying a chalice and refusing the seat the King offered her. The abstraction became a person with a gait, a costume, and a vocal register. The audience didn't memorise a definition. They remembered how she walked.

The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1425) runs over 3,600 lines and was performed in the round, with a moat. Everyman (c. 1495) is the most famous: a man is summoned by Death and finds that Fellowship, Kindred, Goods, and Beauty all abandon him at the grave. Only Good Deeds enters with him.

Where morality plays staged abstractions, mystery plays staged scripture: the Creation, Noah, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Last Judgement. Miracle plays staged the lives of saints. Both genres exploded into the vernacular in the 14th and 15th centuries, organised by town craft guilds.

The great English cycles — York (48 pageants), Chester (24), N-Town, and Wakefield (32, including the brilliant Second Shepherds' Play) — were performed on the feast of Corpus Christi, with each guild responsible for one pageant on a theologically appropriate subject. The Shipwrights staged Noah. The Goldsmiths, the Magi. The Bakers, the Last Supper. The Pinners (nail-makers), the Crucifixion.

The dramaturgy was the doctrine. Production design was a theological argument.

By the mid-14th century the audience no longer travelled to the stage — the stage travelled to the audience. Each guild's pageant wagon was a two-storey cart: a curtained dressing room below, an acting platform above. The wagons were hauled through the city stopping at a dozen marked "stations," repeating their pageant at each one. A viewer who stood in the same spot all day would see the whole Bible roll past, in order.

Other staging conventions you should know:

• Mansions — the older fixed-station model: little timber houses around a square, each representing a location (Heaven, Hell, Pilate's house) that the actors moved between.
• Platea — the neutral playing space between mansions where the actors moved, the equivalent of a stage.
• Hellmouth — a dragon's-head opening built into the wagon's lower deck, hinged, smoking, swallowing the damned. Almost every guild paid a carpenter to build a new one each year.
• Doubling — a single actor often played God in the morning, Pilate at noon, and the Devil after lunch.

A schematic, not a true projection — the major surviving cycles and the cluster of houses where Hildegard's Ordo first sounded.

1. c. 925

   Earliest sung Easter trope (St Gall, Limoges)

2. c. 970

   Regularis Concordia describes Quem Quaeritis at Winchester

3. c. 1100

   First non-Easter Latin dramas: Ludus Danielis, Visitatio Sepulchri expanded

4. 1151

   Hildegard composes Ordo Virtutum at Rupertsberg

5. c. 1200

   Vernacular liturgical drama: Anglo-Norman Jeu d'Adam

6. 1264

   Pope Urban IV institutes Corpus Christi — the festival that will host the cycles

7. c. 1375

   York Mystery Cycle in roughly its surviving form

8. c. 1425

   Castle of Perseverance — earliest English morality play extant

9. c. 1495

   Everyman printed; Mankind in circulation

10. 1547

    Valenciennes Passion: 25 days, illustrated stage plans by Hubert Cailleau

11. 1559

    Reformation: cycle performances banned across most of Protestant Europe

12. 1576

    Last York cycle performance — same year the first London public playhouse opens

Anima

The Soul, as a stage character — usually wordless or singing.

Diabolus

The Devil. In Ordo Virtutum, the only role that cannot sing.

Hellmouth

A hinged stage prop, often a dragon's head, used to swallow the damned.

Mansion

A fixed scenic location set up in a town square or church.

Pageant

(1) A wagon stage; (2) the single playlet performed on it.

Platea

The neutral playing space between mansions.

Psychomachia

“Battle for the soul.” Prudentius's 5th-c. poem — the genre's literary ancestor.

Strepitus

Latin: noise, clatter. Hildegard's word for what the Devil does instead of singing.

Trope

A short sung interpolation into a liturgical chant.

Vice

The comic-villain figure in later moralities; ancestor of Iago and the stage devil of Marlowe.

• Hildegard of Bingen, Ordo Virtutum, ed. Peter Dronke, in Nine Medieval Latin Plays (Cambridge UP, 1994).
• Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 1984), ch. 6.
• O. B. Hardison Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Johns Hopkins, 1965).
• Richard Beadle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd ed. (Cambridge UP, 2008).
• Pamela King, The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (Boydell, 2006).
• Margot Fassler, "Composer and Dramatist: Melodious Singing and the Freshness of Remorse," in Voice of the Living Light, ed. Newman (UC Press, 1998).
• Lynette Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge UP, 1995).