Discuss the origin and development of English Drama. / What are the three
major groups of Middle English drama? Discuss the growth and development of
them. / How do the miracle, morality and the interlude contribute to the
development of drama? / Trace the growth of drama in England till the Renaissance.
The Origin and
Liturgical Plays:
Briefly stated, the drama in England
developed from the liturgical play to the miracle play to morality, from the
morality play to the interlude, and from that to the "regular' drama of
the Elizabethan age. The story of this development is, however, not so simple
as it may wrongly appear. There are overlappings, aberrations, and missing
links.
As in Greece and many other
countries, the drama in England had a religious origin. It sprang from church
service as the ancient Greek tragedy had sprung out of the ceremonial worship
of Dionysus. As a critic well puts it, the "attitude of religion and drama
towards each other has been strikingly varied. Sometimes it has been one of
intimate alliance, sometimes of active hostility, but never of indifference."
In England the church was, in the beginning, actively hostile to drama and all
along during the Dark Ages (the 6th century to the 10th) there is missing any
record of dramatic activity. Only in the ninth century there were tropes or
additional texts to ecclesiastical music. These tropes sometimes assumed a
dialogue form. They were, like church service, couched in Latin. They were
later detached from the regular service and presented by themselves on
religious festivals such as"Easter and Christmas. By and by they took the
form of "liturgical plays" after becoming somewhat more complex. They
were dramatisations of the major events of Christ's life, such as the Birth and
the Resurrection, and were enacted by priests right in the church. These plays
enjoyed a vast popularity. Thus, as Sir Ifor Evans observes, "while at the
beginning of the Dark Ages the church attempted to suppress the drama, at the
beginning of the Middle Ages something very much like the drama was instituted
in the church itself."
The Miracle and
Mystery Plays:
The next stage of development comes
with miracle and mystery plays. The early liturgical drama assumed the more
developed form of the miracle and mystery plays sometime in the fourteenth
century, though, of course, there is evidence that the first representation of
a miracle play took place in Dunstable as early as 1119. In England the
"miracle plays" and "mystery plays" are often considered
svnonvmous. but technicallv there is a difference between the two. The miracle
plays dealt with the lives of saints (non-scriptural matter), whereas the
mystery plays handled incidents from the Bible (scriptural themes). The miracle
and mystery plays differ from the early liturgical drama in their slightly more
developed sense of drama and better dialogue. They were both written and
enacted by ecclesiastics and had for their obvious object the instruction of
the people in scripture history. They treated of such themes from the Bible as
the Creation, the Flood, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection of the Saviour.
But they had an element of entertainment too. in the form of crude
grotesqueries which may appear to the modern reader as outright profanities...................................................................................
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