The Beginnings of English Drama

Drama came back to Europe in the service of the Church.

The language of all the early dramatic pieces is Latin. The vernacular
had no part to play in religious drama, for religious drama was still a
part of Church ceremonial.

The Normans introduced sacred drama to England which soon

became popular. Plays about the Gospel characters and the miracles
of the saints became more elaborate, demanded "stage managing",
turned into complete presentations separated from the ritual of the
Church.

A priest could act Christs resurrection in the Church, but on

highways and greens it tended to be regarded as entertainment
rather than as religious teaching. The word used by Mannyng to
describe these plays is Miracles.

In 1264 Pope Urban instituted the feast of Corpus Christi, and after
1311, a Church Council decreed that it should be celebrated. This day
was chosen by the trade-guilds of the towns of England for the
presentation of a cycle of plays based on incidents from the Bible,
plays which we can call Mystery Plays.

Each guild would choose an episode from the Bible which would
usually be appropriate to the craft or trade practised and had its own
decorated cart, called a pageant. The plays were presented in strict
chronological order. They are anonymous, but they have a certain art
in language and construction, a certain power of characterization,
which no minor poet need have been ashamed to put his name to.

The secular subjects make their way into drama through the Morality.
The Morality was not a guild play and it did not take as its subject a
story from the Bible. It tried to teach a moral lesson through allegory,
that is, by presenting abstract ideas as though they were real people.
An example of the Morality tradition is Everyman that tells about the
appearance of Death to Everyman.

In the last days of the fifteenth century we found very difficult to

distinguish between the Morality and the Interlude. An interlude; was
a short play performed in the middle of something else, perhaps a
feast. The most enjoyable of all the interlude dramatists is John
Heywood whose plays were The Four Ps and the Play of the Weather.

Now the raw materials for Elizabethan drama are being gathered
together. The noble houses have their groups of interlude-players
which will become the Elizabethan companies. The wandering players
of moralities, playing in inn-yards, take over these inn-yards as
permanent theatres. Learned men are writing dramas - like the
"University Wits" who are going to lay the foundations for
Shakespeare. The "University Wits" were graduates of Oxford or
Cambridge. Their dramatic fortunes are tied to the theatres of
London and they produce something better than the old popular
morality-plays.