European Medieval Drama

This article was written with the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, who funded an eighteen-month research sabbatical at the University of Edinburgh. It offers a different strategy as to how a critic might approach the question of humour in the early English Slaughter of the Innocents plays. Without trying to delimit the moments in which humour is identifiable, I suggest that paying attention to the use of emotion in the plays, and how it relates to rapid changes in action and tone, goes some way to thinking about how humour might work within the dramatic shape of the six surviving episodes. The complexity of the emotional responses that I argue are demanded from an audience works with rather than against the sacred content, even when such responses include laughter, and requires paradigms of investigation that move beyond Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque.

The contribution explores an iconic object used in German Passion plays related to the Passion of Christ: the sudarium. Veronica emerged as a very popular saint in the later Middle Ages. Her shroud showing Christ’s face was similarly popular. Its theatrical visualization is related to a practice of piety that prefers a visual approach to holy things. The figure and the artefact gain importance in late medieval plays, where Veronica appears as a preaching figure, providing access to God by her shroud. The paper focusses on the Frankfurt Passion Play and the Alsfeld Passion Play, which reveal different ways of framing the presence of Christ by verbal commentary and underlining the pictorial mode of the sudarium.

The Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is the most important place of worship in Christianity. Since its popularisation in the era of Constantine the Great in the fourth century, pilgrims visit the presumed burial site in order to commemorate the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord and to gain indulgence. Ritual acts around the Holy Sepulchre were at all times connected with power politics. This is also the case for replicas of the tomb erected in sacred spaces as well as temporarily positioned sarcophagi during Easter week or in the context of performances of Passion plays. This article focuses on the dramatization of the Holy Sepulchre in Lucerne and Zurich in the Middle Ages. While the Visitatio Sepulchri staged in the context of the Latin Easter liturgy served to emphasize the exceptional position of ecclesiastical centers and their clergy, vernacular resurrection plays performed on municipal main squares bear witness to church-internal struggles and the growing influence of the bourgeoisie. In Lucerne the secular priest, backed by patricians, introduced the staging of vernacular plays (Donaueschingen Passion Play) in order to break the predominance of the abbey ‘im Hof’. In Zürich the dramatization of the Holy Sepulchre was the preserve of the ‘Grossmünster’ clergy, the preferred church of the burghers. With the staging of the vernacular Easter play (Osterspiel von Muri) on the most significant ‘Lindenhof’, the ‘Grossmünster’ clergy tried to undermine the ‘Fraumünster’ and establish spiritual leadership.

During the Counter-Reformation, Wilhelm Stapfer wrote his Heiligkreuzspiel in order to propagate the Catholic faith and to defend the cult of relics and the worship of the Holy Cross. Its epic forerunner, the legend of the Holy Cross, is a ‘biography’ of the Cross, tracing the relic from its origins in paradise and following it all the way to the present. Stapfer’s Holy Cross is controlled by divine providence, shaping the action of the story. The result is a string of lively and entertaining episodes, in which the animated object appears as both protagonist and antagonist. It influences the history of dramatic plays in the form of a ‘drama of items’ which, in the twentieth century, acted as a precursor to the straight theatre-an example of dramaturgy in which animated objects are part of the action. The difference between modern plays of this kind and the ones composed in the Middle Ages is that in the latter, it is divine providence rather than the objects themselves that promotes the action.

The article examines the alleged duality of the piety of ‘the people’ on the one hand and the official religiousness of clerical elites on the other during the time of the Counter-Reformation in the Swiss Confederation. The study of a saint’s play, performed in 1601 in Sarnen, a village near Lucerne, shows that by performing this play, the rural population and the clerical elite united in stating their common belief and locally shaped opinions. The article investigates how the play enacts local religious traditions, for example by the use of a specific costume of a devil figure or the robe of Saint Niklaus von Flüe, or by staging a procession.

This article focuses on the Miracle de Clovis, which belongs to the group of texts known as Les Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages. This collection contains forty plays, each featuring a miraculous intervention by the Virgin in favour of a character and is attributed to the Saint Eloi Guild of Goldsmiths of Paris. The analysis attempts to articulate the treatment of the characters in the Miracle within the context of the text's production-fourteenth century France-and to bring the text into dialogue with the issues of the Merovingian heritage of that period. The observation of the internal dynamics of the text coupled with a consideration of its context allows the hypothesis to emerge that the Miracle is a political and symbolic testimony of a period of crisis for the royal figure.

During the reign of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, the Czech lands experienced not only an unprecedented cultural blossoming marked by the production of outstanding artistic and architectural objects often meant to be exported to different parts of Europe, but also a period of remarkable political consolidation. Besides numerous founding activities and artistic commissions, the Emperor prompted the composition of several literary texts, one of them (the subject of this article) being a new coronation order of Czech kings. In an unmistakeably theatrical fashion, it stressed their descent from the local House of Przemyslid by means of a non-liturgical Ceremony of Bag and Sandals that allegedly belonged to the first Przemyslid ruler, Przemysl the Ploughman.

This article discusses two Turk plays of Thomas Goffe that were performed at Christ Church in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and subsequently printed: the plays present events from late medieval history, but with extensive classical allusion. The article considers the plays’ use of theatrical reference and books as props: these devices may have encouraged a particular response in the academic audiences who first saw these plays, especially influencing their attitude to the Turkish emperors who are fictionalised presentations of historical medieval figures, exotic, religiously and culturally ‘other’, but also made familiar by their contextualisation among the figures of a classical past, the study of which was the foundation of Tudor education.

This essay analyses four of John Bale’s interludes (Three Laws, God’s Promises, The Temptation, and John Baptist’s Preaching) as early examples of printed plays in England. It shows Bale’s direct involvement in the printing of the plays and his close co-operation with the printer van der Straten. The prints followed two objectives: polemical concerns to create books in favour of the Reformation, and a desire to reflect an interest in performance. These motives affected layout and decoration of the books, which set standards for the print of early Protestant drama in England.