During Middle Ages (from 5th to 14th century) the church authorities are strictly opposed to staging of plays as they thought that dramas would have a demoralizing influence and corrupt the religious values of the society. But ironically the origin of staging plays started from the church and church compounds only. During festive occasions to capture the attention of common people and to inculcate the religious principles, scenes from the life of Jesus Christ and the lives of saints were enacted by priests and their assistants. As more people came to watch these shows, the they shifted their location to church yards to enact these Biblical scenes. These plays dealing with life of Christ or episodes from the Old Testament are called Mystery Plays and the plays about the lives of saints are termed as the Miracle Plays. The earliest Miracle Play in England was "Ludus de Sancta Katharina" performed in Dunstable in 1110. Who wrote the original play was not known. The first version was prepared by Geoffrey of St.Albans, a French teacher of Dunstable. The chief actors spoke in Latin or French while the minor and comic actors used English.
Gradually from 1300 A.D. on wards, the merchant or trade guilds took over this responsibility and staged all these religious plays in a collection or series called cycles on festive occasions. These cycles of plays were enacted on movable theaters with two-story platforms set on wheels or pageant wagons. The lower story was used a dressing room and the upper story as a stage. A trapdoor was there for actors to come up to the stage from the lower story. The figure of a dragon's head was placed on the side of the stage to represent the hell into which evil and vicious characters were pushed into, to show the ultimate punishment given to them by God. These mobile stage platforms moved from one city square to another square in succession giving an opportunity for people to see all the plays one after another. The authorship and the date of composition of these miracle and mystery plays is not known. Most of these cycles have been lost. Only a few plays have remained. The Coventry Cycle has forty-two plays, the Wakefield Cycle has thirty plays, the Chesterfield Cycle has twenty-five plays and the York Cycle, adjudged as the best, has forty-eight plays. Most of these cycles started with the theme of Creation and ended with the Last Judgement. To entertain the audience comic characters like Noah's wife, and the Devil were introduced. Most of these plays dealt with Biblical themes and there was no scope for change or alteration in theme and characters.
The emergence of Morality Plays gave some scope in adding variety and change to plot and characters. These plays are based on allegorical representation of various qualities like Love, Greed, Virtue and Vice, Seven Deadly Sins and states of existence like Life and Death. The triumph of virtue over vice is the main theme of these Morality Plays. More humor and crude jokes were introduced in these plays through the characters of Devil, Vice and others. Like Miracle Plays, no date or authorship of these plays is known. "Every Man", "Pride of Life" and "Castle of Perseverance" are some of the well-known Morality Plays. John Skelton ( 1463-1529) wrote plays like "Magnificence" and "Necromancer". He was the court poet to Henry VII in 1494 and also served as Tutor to young prince Henry VIII for seven years. Apart from Morality Plays he also wrote many satirical poems and elegies. Sir David Lindsay, the poet of Scotch Reformation, satirized the abuses of the church and the state in his Morality Plays by introducing characters disguised as allegories. Thus the purpose of drama gradually shifted from emphasis on ideal Christian values to correction of abuses and shaping of social values. But in Morality plays also the characters representing certain qualities remained as they are without any growth or development in course of the play. So they appear same in all plays without any change, which will not create much interest to spectators.
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| (1463--1529) |
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| John Heywood (1497--1580) |
Interludes started as short dramatic scenes performed at banquets or social gatherings to entertain the guests. Later they were introduced in Miracle and Morality plays to add fun and humor after a solemn or serious theme. Thus they are not an integral part of the original plays. John Heywood (1497-1580), a famous Chorister of the Chapel Royal in the court of Henry VIII raised the level of interlude to a distinct dramatic form called Comedy. He was a popular poet in the court of the Catholic queen Mary. He wrote the interludes for the royal court between 1520 and 1540 such as "The Four P's" and "The Play of the Weather", "The Play of Love" and "Wytty and Wytless". He was a musician, poet, singer and an epigrammist (Collector and writer of proverbs). His style is witty and satirical with a moral message. He was the first writer to turn the abstract characters of the Morality Plays into real, day-to-day living persons. His interludes serve as a link between the Morality Plays and the modern drama. As a staunch follower of Catholic faith he could not stay in England and had to flee to Mechlen in Belgium when Queen Elizabeth I made the act of Uniformity in 1564 against Catholics. Incidentally he was the grandfather to John Donne, the famous metaphysical poet and preacher of the seventeenth century.
The early English Playwrights mixed both prose and crude verse (called doggerel) in their plays but without any literary quality.The artistic period of drama began when the play was written not to represent a moral but to represent human life as it is. The influence of Greek and Latin writers during the Renaissance period (from 14th to 16th century) promoted the development of the English drama further. The invention of printing press, the establishment of educational institutions, the growing number of literate people and the peaceful political conditions along with interaction with foreign traders and representatives brought about a noticeable change and improvement in the quality of the English drama. Many playhouses or theaters were established on the outskirts of the London city. The religious authorities and higher political powers did not approve of the performance of plays within the city as they thought that it would lead to lawlessness and spoil the general discipline and moral values of the society.
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16th August, 2015 Somaseshu Gutala
Note : Dear Readers, Before describing my visit to Shakespeare's famous theater "Globe" on the bankside in Southwark region, I thought it would be proper to give some details about the evolution of the Elizabethan Drama (1562 to 1642) which has earned world-wide acclaim as many great dramatists of that age contributed a lot to make the drama a living voice of those times and portrayed the general human nature from different angles so that they are plays of not one age but of all ages.
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