The Journey from Gaufridus to Shakespeare.

The earliest known plays in England were the Mystery plays.  Such plays consisted of biblical stories arranged in cycles around themes associated with major holy days.  The first records of the plays date from the early 14^th century, a century after the first spoken Mystery/Miracle plays are recorded in Germany and France.

The long development of such plays may have begun as early as the 4^th century with pageants presented in many major European cities.  These festival pageants included what, in England, came to be called “dumb shows”.  These followed the leaders of the city marching in procession, dressed in their public finery.  Variations of time and place apply.

During the 11^th century, France and Germany brought their dumb shows inside of churches and cathedrals to enact the Stations of the Cross and related scriptures during Lent services.  One or more of the priests would read an explicatory text in Latin while the dumb show was being performed.  The common members of the church — for whom such shows surely were primarily intended — being unable to understand Latin, the churches eventually convinced Rome to allow the texts to be read in the vulgar languages.

Claims have been made that one Geoffrey (Gaufridus), a Norman schoolmaster (Lector) at the school at Dunstable, England, actually wrote the first Mystery play in the country in 1110.  This is due, it would seem, to a hurried reading by Thomas Warton, the author of the famous History of English Poetry.[1]  Geoffrey is recorded, in fact,  as having made (“fecit”) an entertainment (“ludus”) commonly called a “Miracle” (quem “Miracula” vulgariter appellamus).[2]

The players wore choir copes for costumes.  After the Miracle, Geoffrey’s chambers caught fire and the copes and his books went up in  flames.  He joined the Order of St. Alban’s, which ran the school, because he was unable to reimburse the Abbot for the loss. Eventually, he himself became Abbot.

If Geoffrey was light-years ahead of most of his fellow scholars, however, the “making” would only have amounted to writing the exposition for a dumb show.  If he was only up with the latest trends (a thing rare in insular England), the “making” would have  amounted to writing staging directions, descriptions of the physical acts to be performed and identifying the marks to which the players were to proceed.

The first record of biblical pageants regularly being performed in England date from 1318. The characters still did not have spoken parts. They played their dumb shows on platforms pulled from crowd to crowd by horses.  These were necessarily very small.[3] Range of motion was strictly limited.

Soon text was being composed for the characters to speak.  The earliest known text would seem to date from around 1340.[4]  The texts make clear that the plays consisted of set speeches and long passages intended to describe the action that could not otherwise be portrayed.  They were in English.

English plays remained unchanged for nearly 200 years.  The Italians chaffed at having to act their plays on tiny platforms in churches, and, during the 15^th century, began building large outdoor wooden scaffolds — some three stories high — laid out to resemble church interiors.[5]  Free of holy spaces, they realized almost immediately that they were also free of the holy texts.  They were the first in Europe to perform modern secular plays.

In the meantime, the tiny English stage continued to be drawn by horses behind the authorities on festival days.  It took Henry VIII breaking from the Catholic church before secular plays began to be performed.

The new secular plays did not arise out of whole cloth, though.  At first the stages remained small and the scenes were limited to a small number of actors (most generally three).  As at the beginning of a Mystery play cycle, one dominant actor opened each play setting the scene for the audience.  Most scenes featured a main speaker briefly punctuated by another (or two).  They spoke in variations of rhymed seven-stress and ballad lines precluding natural speech.

The first step away from the Mystery plays was toward the ancient classics.  Still the stages were small — in most places a platform in a modest room.  Seneca, a classical playwright who also had to work with small stages, in his own day, became the next model for proceeding.  The opening speakers in Seneca’s plays spoke still longer monologues in order to set the scene.  The end of the monologue and appearance of a second speaker marked the beginning of the second scene.  All but the choruses of Seneca’s plays were written in unrhymed hexameters and promised much more natural speech once his model would become pervasive.

Even the 1566 play Gorboduc —  generally considered the first modern English play —, however, a brief and revolutionary first dialogue scene is followed by a series of set speeches by King Gorboduc and his senior counselors in order to set the scene.  This even though the play was acted at the Inns of Court which provided one of the few large stages of the time.  Still more, each act is dutifully preceded by a dumb show.  Centuries of tradition were not going to be ended without a protracted struggle regardless of improved logistics.

As I have pointed out in the appropriate appendix of my variorum edition of Ulysses and Agamemnon, Ulysses’ famous long set speech at the beginning of the play argues forcefully for 1584, the date it appears in the records of the Court of Elizabeth I, rather than 1599, the date its text was gathered into Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.  Actually, 1584 is a bit late for the practice.

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[1] Warton, Thomas. The History of English Poetry Hazllit, ed. (1871)., II.216.

[2] Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani A.D. 793-1290 (1867), 73.  “Legit igitur apud Dunestapliam, expectans

scholam Sancti Albani, sibi repromissam ; ubi quemdam ludum de Sancta Katerina,—quem “ Miracula “ vulgariter appellamus,—fecit. Ad quæ decoranda, petiit a Dunstaple. Sacrista Sancti Albani, ut sibi capæ chorales accommodarentur, et obtinuit. Et fuit ludus ille de Sancta Katerina.”

[3] Davidson, Charles. Studies in the English Mystery Plays (1892), 93.  “It seems, then, that shortly after the confirmation of Corpus Christi in 1318 pageants of the Biblical story were introduced in conjunction with the banners of the crafts. These at first were mute mysteries expressed by action. In a short time, however, spoken drama, found also in isolated cases in France, became an established custom in England.”

[4] Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, Vol. 14 (1901), 63.  “The earliest MS. play extant is found in the British Museum, Harleian MSS. 2253, and dates from the early part of the reign of Edward III., circa 1340.”  Earlier texts may since have been found but I’ve yet to learn of them.

[5] Davidson, 76. “This stationary platform, often of great size and sometimes of three stories, with Hell beneath and Heaven above, and crowded with persons and paraphernalia, was a distinctive feature of the continental play. To this the English cycles presented a marked contrast. The gild plays of England changed the station of the continental stage into a movable pageant, or platform, and instead of calling the population of a city to the stage, rolled the platform through the streets in orderly succession from audience to audience.”

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• A Medieval Hodge-Podge. March 17, 2019. “The hogge pot had already existed for centuries, however. Many who fail to realize this have given spurious derivations to the name.”
• Henry VII’s Keeper of the Lions, John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford.  May 5, 2019.  “The Park, which would seem to have hosted the first porcupine ever to inhabit English soil, was completely enclosed by a wall.”
• Did Shake-speare Die of a Stroke?  August 03, 2014. "In October of 1601 De Vere begins to complain of his health again in letters to his brother-in-law, Robert Cecil, who was representing him in certain legal matters at Court."
• Check out the Medieval Topics Article Index for many more articles about this fascinating time.
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