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 already in the days of Dante; while the religious drama gradually acquired an artificial character and elaboration of form assimilating it to the classical attempts, to be noted below, which gave rise to the regular Italian drama. The poetry of the Troubadours, which had come from Provence into Italy, here frequently took a dramatic form, and may have suggested some of his earlier poetic experiments to Petrarch.

It was a matter of course that remnants of the ancient popular dramatic entertainments should have survived in particular abundance on Italian soil. They were to be recognized in the improvised farces performed at the courts, in the churches (farse spirituali), and among the people; the Roman carnival had preserved its wagon-plays, and various links remained to connect the modern comic drama of the Italians with the Atellanes and mimes of their ancestors. But the more notable later comic developments, which belong to the 16th century, will be more appropriately noticed below. Moralities proper had not flourished in Italy, where the love of the concrete has always been dominant in popular taste; more numerous are examples of scenes, largely mythological, in which the influence of the Renaissance is already perceptible, of eclogues, and of allegorical festival-plays of various sorts.

In Spain hardly a monument of the medieval religious drama has been preserved. There is manuscript evidence of the 11th century attesting the early addition of dramatic elements to the Easter office; and a Spanish fragment of the Three Kings Epiphany play, dating from the 12th century, is, like the French Adam, one of the very earliest examples of the medieval drama in the vernacular. But that religious plays were performed in Spain is clear from the permission granted by Alphonso X. of Castile (d. 1284) to the clergy to represent them, while prohibiting the performance by them of juegos de escarnio (mocking plays). The earliest Spanish plays which we possess belong to the end of the 15th or beginning of the 16th century, and already show humanistic influence. In 1472 the couplets of Mingo Revulgo (i.e. Domingo Vulgus, the common people), and about the same time another dialogue by the same author, offer examples of a sort resembling the Italian contrasti (see below).

The German religious plays in the vernacular, the earliest of which date from the 14th and 15th centuries, and were produced at Trier, Wolfenbuttel, Innsbruck, Vienna, Berlin, &c., were of a simple kind; but in some of them, though they were written by clerks, there are traces of the minstrels’ hands. The earliest complete Christmas play in German, contained in a 14th-century St Gallen MS., has nothing in it to suggest a Latin original. On the other hand, the play of The Wise and the Foolish Virgins, in a Thuringian MS. thought to be as early as 1328, a piece of remarkable dignity, was evidently based on a Latin play. Other festivals besides Christmas were celebrated by plays; but down to the Reformation Easter enjoyed a preference. In the same century miracle-plays began to be performed, in honour of St Catherine, St Dorothea and other saints. But all these productions seem to belong to a period when the drama was still under ecclesiastical control. Gradually, as the liturgical drama returned to the simpler forms from which it had so surprisingly expanded, and ultimately died out, the religious plays performed outside the churches expanded more freely; and the type of mystery associated with the name of the Frankfort canon Baldemar von Peterweil communicated itself, with other examples, to the receptive region of the south-west. The Corpus Christi plays, or (as they were here called) Frohnleichnamsspiele, are notable, since that of Innsbruck (1391) is probably the earliest extant example of its class. The number of non-scriptural religious plays in Germany was much smaller than that in France; but it may be noted that (in accordance with a long-enduring popular notion) the theme of the last judgment was common in Germany in the latter part of the middle ages. Of this theme Antichrist may be regarded as an episode, though in 1469 an Antichrist appears to have occupied at Frankfort four days in its performance. The earlier (12th century) Antichrist is a production quite unique of its kind; this political protest breathes the Ghibelline spirit of the reign (Frederick Barbarossa’s) in which it was composed.

Though many of the early German plays contain an element of the moralities, there were few representative German examples of the species. The academical instinct, or some other influence, kept the more elaborate productions on the whole apart from the drolleries of the professional strollers (fahrende Leute), whose Shrove-Tuesday plays (Fastnachtsspiele) and cognate productions reproduced the practical fun of common life. Occasionally, no doubt, as in the Lübeck Fastnachtsspiel of the Five Virtues, the two species may have more or less closely approached to one another. When, in the course of the 15th century, Hans Rosenplüt, called Schnepperer—or Hans Schnepperer, called Rosenplüt—the predecessor of Hans Sachs, first gave a more enduring form to the popular Shrove-Tuesday plays, a connexion was already establishing itself between the dramatic amusements of the people and the literary efforts of the “master-singers” of the towns. But, while the main productivity of the writers of moralities and cognate productions—a species particularly suited to German latitudes—falls into the periods of Renaissance and Reformation, the religious drama proper survived far beyond either in Catholic Germany, and, in fact, was not suppressed in Bavaria and Tirol till the end of the 18th century.

It may be added that the performance of miracle-plays is traceable in Sweden in the latter half of the 14th century; and that the German clerks and laymen who immigrated into the Carpathian lands, and into Galicia in particular, in the later middle ages, brought with them their religious plays together with other elements of culture. This fact is the more striking, inasmuch as, though Czech Easter plays were performed about the end of the 14th century, we hear of none among the Magyars, or among their neighbours of the Eastern empire.

Coming now to the English religious drama, we find that from its extant literature a fair general idea may be derived of the character of these medieval productions. The miracle-plays, miracles or plays (these being the terms used in England) of which we hear in London in the 12th century were probably written in Latin and acted by ecclesiastics; but already in the following century mention is made—in the way of prohibition—of plays acted by professional players. (Isolated moralities of the 12th century are not to be regarded as popular productions.) In England as elsewhere, the clergy either sought to retain their control over the religious plays, which continued to be occasionally acted in churches even after the Reformation, or else reprobated them with or without qualifications. In Cornwall miracles in the native Cymric dialect were performed at an early date; but those which have been preserved are apparently copies of English (with the occasional use of French) originals; they were represented, unlike the English plays, in the open country, in extensive amphitheatres constructed for the purpose—one of which, at St Just near Penzance, has recently been restored.

The flourishing period of English miracle-plays begins with the practice of their performance by trading-companies in the towns, though these bodies were by no means possessed of any special privileges for the purpose. Of this practice Chester is said to have set the example (1268–1276); it was followed in the course of the 13th and 14th centuries by many other towns, while in yet others traces of such performances are not to be found till the 15th, or even the 16th. These towns with their neighbourhoods include, starting from East Anglia, where the religious drama was particularly at home, Wymondham, Norwich, Sleaford, Lincoln, Leeds, Wakefield, Beverley, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne, with a deviation across the border to Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In the north-west they are found at Kendal, Lancaster, Preston,