MEDIEVAL DRAMA

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 3, 4 July 1938, Page 3

MEDIEVAL DRAMA

W.E.A. LECTURE

Continuing his course on drama .to the Workers' Educational Association Mr. R. Hogg dealt in his last lecture with English drama before ShakeSPThee: Christian Church which -had crushed the degenerate theatre of Rome was the cradle of the new drama on the Continent and in England, he said: In the fourteenth century cycles ol sacred drama were written, not in. Latin but in the vernacular tongue, and these cycles of plays assumed an immense proportion, covering Biblical history from the story of the Creation to the Last Judgment. Mystery plays were largely concerned with Biblical events; Miracle plays with incidents from the lives of saints and from legends, while morality plays were allegorical, the plots being invented and the characters being personified virtues and vices. Interludes, which were common at the same time, were short pieces intended to be presented as entertainments at feasts or between drinking bouts. In England the cycles of Miracle plays were split up to be performed on different stages, so that the whole series might be performed concurrently, the birth,of Christ being shown in one street and Pilate's court in another street. The parts were all played by men; the costumes were elaborate and gorgeous but inaccurate. The texts were inadequate and the prompter was therefore much in evidence, often pointing with, his stick to the next one )to speak. The dramatist did not hesitate to introduce characters and incidents into the Biblical story, and many of these additions give a glimpse of contempory, life in England. .:' With the Renaissance there came a revised interest in the drama of Greece and Rome, and the earliest English plays of this time were a curious hotchpotch of garbled history, country legend, and Greek mythology. The early Elizabethan writers, wrote to draw the crowds—"the groundlings"— so that along with poetry and refined sentiment went battle, murder, violence, . torture, buffoonery, and spectacle.

The lecture concluded with, an analysis of Christopher Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta," after which there was discussion, followed by a play reading.