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This page, when completed, will narrate the centuries of church abolishment and resurrection between the classics and their rediscovery.

Dark Ages

Some wonder if the proscription of theatre throughout western Europe caused the Dark Ages of the next 600 years, during which time religion battled for souls and pondered the puzzle of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Others note the irony of an Easter Sunday near the end of the first millennium, in the predawn light of the Renaissance, at the Catholic monastery of St Gall, in Switzerland, where priests impersonating angels and the Marys acted out the Quem Quaeritis trope, in Latin:

“Whom seek ye in the tomb, Oh Christians?”
“Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, O Heavenly Beings.”
“He is not here, he is risen as foretold. Go and announce that he has risen from the tomb.”

Ironically, almost simultaneously, a German nun, Hrotsvitha (935–73 CE), “the most remarkable woman of her time,” wrote six plays in Church Latin, modeled on Terence (but with Christian themes), to become the world’s first Neoclassic playwright, and one of the very few whose whose names and works appear until the late Fourteenth Century. Whether these plays were performed in their time is doubtful—surely not for the laity; they were in Latin, and theatrical performances were still forbidden.

Not so with Quem Quaeritis. In no time scriptural tropes turned into playlets, in vernacular dialects, based on Bible stories to attract worshipers, so successful that they overflowed into the streets and spread all over Europe, converting monarchs and their subjects to the One True Faith.

The Dark and Middle Ages

So effective was the Catholic ban—which remained in effect in many places until the 18th Century—that no evidence exists of the wholly human art for the next 600 years.

The first known playwright after the death of Seneca (65 CE) was Hrotsvitha (935–973), a German nun—”the most remarkable woman of her time”—who wrote six Christian plays, with feminist themes, modeled on the comedies of Terence. These plays were not produced, however, until the 16th Century, and centuries passed before another name appears.

Moment #3: Revival

Ironically (to say the least), it was that very Catholic Church that resurrected drama, in much the same way, and for the same reasons, as the Greeks—rooted in religious rites, emerging into characters that told of miracles and fate to spread the word of God.

Late in the 10th Century CE, church attendance in steep decline, three three French priests inserted a three-line trope into the Easter Mass and pretended to be the Marys with the Angel. This innovation proved so popular that churches everywhere did likewise, and on other Holy Days, to renew interest.

Over time these tropes evolved into reenactments, in Latin, of the miracles of Christ and other liturgical themes, played at various stations of the cross until they overflowed the church and spilled into the streets, with plays written and performed, in native language, by tradesmen, to entertain—and indoctrinate—the common crowd. Because these plays were all religious, and the actors amateurs, Church drama was exempt from the Catholic ban.

First came the Mystery plays, with stories from the Bible on a platform stage, the stations spread from Heaven to the Mouth of Hell, the Devil as a clown; then spin-off Miracle plays on the lives of the saints, dozens of them, played in cycles from Creation to Resurrection at religious festivals in hundreds of European towns and cities. From them arose Morality Plays, dramatic allegories on human life, good and evil in the world. All three grew and flourished throughout the Middle Ages.

A small number of these plays exists, all by “Anonymous,” some of which have literary merit and are worth a read, especially for their influence on Marlowe and Shakespeare, but that, too, is another Moment.

Far more significant is the part religious drama played in the Holy Wars between the fledgling European nations and the Church.

In 1495, Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, and within ten years the Peasants’ Revolt broke out, triggering more than a century of devastating religious wars, first between the rising European nations and the Roman Church, then among the several Protestant sects in the Thirty Years War (1618-38). The faith and politics of the rulers determined state religions, and each employed religious drama to extol its virtues and to vilify all others, which often led to riot and rebellion.

So powerful were these plays that when they turned against both church and state, demanding secular needs in the name of Jesus, the temporal powers and the Catholic Council of Trent responded with a ban on plays with religious themes, and six centuries of mystery and morality plays came to a sudden end.

Sound familiar?