MEDIEVAL DRAMA

Hello everyone and welcome you all again in my Blog . Today’stopic t is a continuation to the last one, though the pieces of information that I am going to deliver this time are going to be deep, analytical and detailed. The last time we talked about drama and we have traced its origins, this time we are going to talk about a historical phase that the English drama went through and that had granted it a specific dulcitude in comparison to the other literary genres.

Medieval Drama or the Drama of the middle ages started firstly as mimetic representations of religious ideologies through recounting the historical incidents mentioned in the Bible . Drama at that time was held in churches where clerics and afterward laymen endorsed the events of Holy Scripture, God's dealings with His people in the Old and New Testaments as well as stories of common people’s struggling to find their way to God’s heaven . Dramatic spectacles were often linked to the Church's annual festival of Easter Sunday.

Nevertheless, it was bit by bit enlarged to encompass the events honored at other great feasts such as Christmas and the Epiphany, and even saints' days in some places.

You might be wondering why would drama follow such firm religious themes , the answer is Church during the Middle ages or Dark ages the period estimated to start from the fall of Rome in 476 CE until the beginning of the Renaissance in 14th century was the absolute power and its power could not be maintained unless it would ensure that most of the masses are ignorant. What the church actually did is implanting this feeling of contempt and hatred towards the Classical Antiquity for being a pagan civilization. The church also ascertained that all the scientific and philosophical heritage left by the Greek and Roman civilization would be burnt or hidden away from people’s reach to prevent them from verifying the validity of the Church’s claims about the reality of the human being and his relationship with God. As a matter of fact, Drama during the middle ages was not considered a means of entertainment by the priests but rather it was a means through which the church could spread its control over people through filling it with subtle religious messages that serve the church’s hegemony and power.

Medieval Drama underwent two main phases the first one From the 10th to the 13th centuries , in this period most of the plays were in Latin, the official language of the Roman liturgy, however starting from the 14th until the 15th centuries a vernacular religious drama burgeoned in all of the western European countries and it included a relevant stories inspired from people’s lives from creation to the Day of Judgment.

In fact, The medieval religious drama was invented by the Benedictine monks during the carolinian renaissance. It was a phase of the literary and artistic work that escorted the renovations of liturgical service books following charlemagne's instructions , and held through essentially lyrical characters that are commonly known as tropes.

There were mainly three types : Mystery plays The mystery plays are sequences of performances, they used the mysteries of God as their primary theme. They aimed tobring forward ,the daily happenings in the course of a day, how the universe was created from the the start until the Last Judgement , stories of salvation and damnation. Miracle plays told the stories of saints and the holy spirit whereas morality plays that were allegorical (i.e. the characters and events have symbolic meaning) and provided the audience with Christian moral guidance. In this type of religious drama the audience followed a primary character (representing mankind) as they encounter a cast of personified vices and virtues, before ultimately turning to righteousness and salvation.