No medieval pope ever "forbade the performance of religious plays in
churches." If Innocent IV (whose dates are 1243-1254) legislated against
certain kinds of theatre in churches, he would have been following
precedents set by Innocent III (1198-1216) and the Fourth Lateran Council,
among others, and clarified by Gregory IX (1227-1241) - to the effect that
only plays related to the liturgy and festivals of the Christian year
should be performed in church buildings. The tenor of Innocent III's
legislation (e.g. Lateran IV c.16) was that clerics should not involve
themselves with secular business, and thus should not be participating in
the ludic activities ("play," broadly conceived) of the public sphere:
defined as dicing, drinking in taverns, hunting, and hawking, as well as
mimetic activities. The "motive" for these reforms was to try to maintain
a distance between the clergy from the laity, to make their behavior as
well as their dress distinctive. But Gregory IX's decretal of 1234 stated
explictly that it was "not forbidden to perform _The Manger of the Lord_,
the _Herod_ play, the _Magi_, and _Rachel Weeping for Her Children_ [i.e.
the Christmas cycle], and those other plays linked to those festivals . . .
since such plays touch men's consciences rather than lead them to
wantonness and evil desires, just as at Easter _The Sepulchre of the Lord_
and other plays are staged to arouse devotion" (as quoted by William
Tydeman, _The Theatre in the Middle Ages_ [Cambridge, 1978], 65). The
plays thus frowned upon for production inside churches were the "plays
about the king and the queen," as the Bishop of Worcester categorized them
in 1240: Robin Hood plays, mumming plays, what have you. The best overview
by far is that of David Mills in, of all places, _The Dictionary of the
Middle Ages_, under "Drama, Western European." For a longer treatment,
there's Glynne Wickham's _The Medieval Theatre_ (3rd edition, Cambridge,
1987). Of course, there's lots of evidence to show that papal injunctions
were not always followed, cf. Chaucer's foppish clerk Absalom in _The
Miller's Tale_, who likes to strut and fret his hour upon "the scaffold
high" - albeit as Herod (a real "part to tear a cat in," as Shakespeare
would later say). But it's true that the clergy were only *supposed* to
play the roles of overseers in the dramatic productions of the
confraternities and guilds.
It is important that we unpack the notion that "[r]eligious drama moved
outside and became secularized, played in the vernacular language by
ordinary people, especially in England where the elaborate craft cycles
evolved." Yes, drama "moved outside" the church and its immediate sacred
precincts (the porch, the cemetery) by the thirteenth century, but plays
*and liturgies* produced in secular spaces and unsponsored by the Church
existed side by side with liturgy and drama inside the churches. The
difference was the venacular, yes indeed. But the only vernacular plays
that survive from the thirteenth century - and the first plays to be
soponsored by and produced in towns - are all from northern France; more
specifically, from the region northeast of Paris and south of the Flemish
border. The plays from Arras, among them Jehan Bodel's _Jeu de
saint-Nicolas_ and Adam de la Halle's jeux "de la feuillee" and "de Robin
et Marion", predate by almost two hundred years the earliest evidence for
the big English cycle plays and other large-scale civic theatricals on the
Continent. That doesn't mean that they were the only vernacular plays,
just the only one written down - and that has everything to do with Picardy
and its manuscript culture. The plays are secular, at least in some
senses, but they are far from irreligious - as I will prove. And they are
also from "ordinary." I'm writing a dissertation on this, which has been a
black hole in theatre scholarship for a long time. The reason we know so
much about England is that it's the only country to have produced scholars
interested in studying their theatrical heritage on a grand scale - not
because that's where the best evidence is, or where it all happened. See
Glynn Wickham's hepful review article on "Trends n International Drama
Research" in Eckehard Simon, ed., "_The Theatre of Medieval Europe_
(Cambridge, 1991).
The word "evolved" must also be used with extreme caution, since its gives
tacit credence to the Karl Young's brillant, influential, and erroneous
thesis: that medieval theatre evolved from simple to more complex
liturgical forms, broke free of the shackles of the Church when it became
more sophisticated, went secular, and finally died a natural death in the
Renaissance - because, in Darwinian terms, it was a lower life form and
could not survive. Glynne Wickham showed that this was not what happened,
and others have followed suit, notably V.A. Kolve and Stanley Kahrl.
Guess I'd better get back to work on that dissertation of mine -
Carol Symes
Tutor in History and Literature
Harvrad University
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