Medieval Theater Traditions

good afternoon we are going to skip ahead we're still in module 3 but we're going to skip ahead several centuries from uh the fall of the ancient roman empire uh and we're going to be looking at medieval theater traditions today again based in europe uh later on in the course we'll talk about some uh simultaneous theater traditions that were going on elsewhere in the world but right now we're still in continental europe and and england and we're going to be looking at the middle ages or medieval theater by the way i will use those terms synonymously middle ages or middle medieval theater and we're basically talking about the period from about 980 to 1500 a.d um this is a time when uh we're not gonna read a play based in this unit but we we this is a bridge a bridge time period in terms of the development of theater that gets us from classical ancient greece and rome um theater to renaissance theater so it's important that we study that transition period that took place in the medieval times in order to determine and see how things developed in the renaissance that that became some of the most famous uh pieces of theater that we know today all right so we're going to get started with medieval theater and um we first want to talk about medieval society as as you can see from this um painting uh which you i don't know if you can tell from the blur but this is basically a king pulling off his crown to salute the the bishop or the pope um that is greeting him and uh this demonstrates one of the most important things that we want to remember please note this the power of the roman catholic church in the medieval society and the middle ages all aspects of society and social life are governed by the roman catholic church the pope has more power than any king um kings would literally curry favor with the pope in order to get what they want so a lot of wealth is amassed by the church a lot of political power and even um the pope and the vatican had armies that fought for it and took part in wars they were major players the church was the major player in all aspects of social life during the middle ages and we'll see how that even affects theater as well education was fairly non-existent in fact the only people that really needed to get educated or learn how to read were the clergy people in the church um the church became the repository for all books for all knowledge this is before really the printing presses invented in the late 1400s so things are hand written by monks in monasteries or by nuns in convents interestingly women could get educated if they wanted to become a nun but there really was no need to teach um certainly peasants but even farmers or even some nobles some nobility did not need to know how to read or any kind of education so long as they knew how to fight and supposedly govern their people um public health and safety is again pretty much non-existent you were reliant upon your local lord or baron for protection from um the neighboring baron or lord the feudal system was in play here or you relied upon the church um public health this is the era of the plagues right towns and systems and cities were wiped out by plagues almost every decade and your life expectancy was very low as a normal person um and this has an effect on their world view as well right uh the notion of i'm lucky to be alive is very different than our current contemporary notion of how long do we you know we we try to um keep life going using science and medicine and all these things to ripe old ages and um that was not the case back then class the class structure there really was not yet a large middle class um or a large merchant class that starts developing during the middle ages during the medieval society and that's going to affect theater as well so we basically have peasants who are uneducated and illiterate who are working the farms and and tending to their families and then we have the nobility the barons the the lords um and and the church existing there as well but those are really the classes that exist um there is certainly no there aren't a factories there are no workers there's no working class and there's as i said a very small but growing middle class of let's say merchants or artisans or trades people so the church has this big problem of how do we reach the people and how do we teach the people how do we get the peasants and the commoners to behave and to learn um scripture etc how do we how do we access this if they can't read and we're not printing bibles to hand out to them how are we going to teach um the right way to go about uh living and of course the answer as you may have guessed is through theater so please note we have three major types of theater that occurred during the middle ages and i'm generalizing but in general we could say three major types the first was called liturgical drama and as you can see from that picture liturgical drama was based inside of um it was performed inside of the churches it was sponsored by the churches and it was chanted in latin because that was the language of the church the bible was written in latin the priests chanted in latin and prayed in latin um this was and what's funny about that is that even at the time latin was already a dead language the people in germany didn't speak latin the people in england didn't speak latin you only spoke latin for the prayers and the hymnals when you got into church so while these plays depicted stories from the bible either the old testament new testament or stories of the saints lives by the way uh these were also called mystery plays if they were took place in the old testament or miracle plays if they were from the new testament or the saints lives so again that's mystery and miracle plays but again they were right now chanted in latin and that didn't make much sense because the people didn't speak latin so next we evolved into what's called vernacular religious drama and vernacular is just a long word meaning language of the people some today might call it slang or lower class talking lower class speech but again all that it means is the language of the people the language that people spoke and so here these were actually performed outdoors usually outside the church in a town square and you can see in this picture they were usually performed on these wagons that could travel and tour from town to town but then also could unfold and become the stage where the where the piece was performed this became very useful and practical um they were spoken in the native language of wherever they were performed so in germany vernacular religious drama the miracle plays or the mystery plays were performed in german and in england they were performed in english and in italy they were performed in italian so these were much more accessible to the normal people to the peasants and achieved the purpose which was to teach the peasants the stories of the bible and moral behavior they were sponsored by the town trade guilds these growing middle class merchants maybe the cobblers the shoemakers or the tanners the leather makers wine makers etc and they would pick and choose their stories very purposefully so for example the story of noah's ark perhaps the town trade guild of all the ship builders would sponsor that performance um and they could say you know this was a kind of advertising the the york shipbuilders are bringing you this play about the most famous shipbuilder of all noah so that was used very strategically and again these still focus these were the mystery and miracle plays that focused on the bible and saints stories and the third type which is a little bit different is called the morality plays which were not miracle and mystery plays the morality plays were performed outside or inside they were very flexible they did not have big set pieces or anything like that also performed in the native language like vernacular religious drama and often they were sponsored by a wealthy patron or a political leader just like in ancient rome to curry favor with the people or to say look at how generous and magnanimous i'm being i am sponsoring um i'm i'm the producer i'm sponsoring this um production and they were fables or allegories that were very simplistic tales that symbolized um normal people sort of an everyman character or an everyday character who encounters forces let's say charity or jealousy or other kinds of emotions or abstract concepts that were then personified and they would tell a story about good versus evil so for example in the tale of every man this character every man is told you're going to die you need to find one friend to go with to die with you you have to find one friend to take with you to the afterlife and so he goes around and he you know asks his friend um his friend wealth hey wealth will you come with me to the afterlife and wealth says well no i'm a little busy right now and i'm not gonna come with you to heaven he says oh okay i guess wealth won't stick with me when i die how about um false friends hey false you know friendship hey friendship will you come with me to the afterlife and friendship says no no i've got other things to do and so of course he realizes friends don't stick with you when you die and finally he befriend he finds the character good deeds or charitable works and he says good deeds will you come with me in the afterlife and good deed says i will stick with you always the moral of the story being if you perform good deeds during your life you will get into heaven and and have a good afterlife so these were sort of again allegorical teaching pedantic plays meant to teach moral behavior and these three types of drama really were what made up medieval trauma some noteworthy things about this time period um the actors were all amateur townspeople volunteers but a playmaster or director was usually hired so in each town again if the vernacular religious drama came through on the wagons um they would have a director attached to each play so that it had a little bit of um uh dramatic worth um and and this beast became especially the touring that the wagons touring from town to town these became um highlights of the year was you know oh my gosh mama mama let's go see uh jonah and the whale has come to town or abraham and isaac is here or the the story uh the crucifixion is here um i loved that when they did it last year let's go see so these became very very fun for the townspeople um they had a lot of special effects which were called secrets that was the term given to special effects in medieval theater um they might involve trap doors uh in the wagon where for example the devil character could pop up from underneath the wagon or flames might come up from underneath the wagon flying an angel etc uh there was one production of noah's ark that took place in belgium where they actually flooded the town square they used a bunch of big water barrels to flood the town square in the middle of the play so that was a lot of fun as well don't ask me where the audience did i have no idea um unlike greek theater which was climactic dramatic structure if you think about it the bible consists of many different episodes and each episode you if in the story of abraham right it doesn't take place in real time it doesn't take place in one place they travel from place to place um the story of the exodus of moses right they leave egypt and they come back to the land of canaan well it would be very hard to follow the unities of time place in action if you have to cover 40 years of noah's ark right the 40 years they sailed 40 days 40 nights etc um or the the locations and there's many different plots going on because it's the bible there's all sorts of different stories so we develop this new we break the unities for the first time and we have this episodic dramatic structure which is sometimes called epic dramatic structure as well and that's gonna be very important by the time we get to shakespeare we have our first female playwright crossvita of gandersim and i think that's a very fun name to say she was a nun a german nun who again because they were allowed to be educated and learned to read she actually found the roman comedies of terence you remember the roman playwright terence and she translated them into german and turned them into more appropriate christian themes so sometimes she did a little editing but she adopted these plays and is credited as being the first published female playwright in the history of western theater so i mean still we don't have female performers but interesting little note there and lastly remember though that low theater that existed outside of the big roman theaters the traveling troops of the jugglers and the mimes and the uh animal acts etc that still survives and that's still going around largely thanks to the roma people the gypsy people and that tradition is actually what kept a lot of theater alive outside of these mirror mystery and miracle plays um and a lot of the theatrical traditions we know about today are thanks to this exterior or other alternative side of theater kept alive by the gypsy people all right very important to remember and this is why i bring this up this is why this is so important this is the world that shakespeare and his contemporaries and his parents grew up in they studied the classics example for example the greek and roman plays in grade school we're going to find out that elizabeth in the next unit queen elizabeth started public schooling but they didn't have anything to read so they read ancient greek and ancient roman plays and poetry they learned from the mystery and the morality plays as children they would have seen shakespeare and his contemporaries would have seen the traveling carts going from town to town performing these stories from the bible and they learned that style they learned that episodic structure and the special effects and the costumes etc they they would have watched that and had enjoyed it as well as they were entertained by those traveling troops with the minds and the juggling and the dancing and the singing shakespeare and his contemporaries incorporated a lot of those kinds of alternative theater styles in their writing it wasn't just storytelling he incorporated music and um animals right there's many dogs in shakespearean plays that get a lot of laughs so this these all were there to help create the world that shakespeare and his contemporaries then turned into what we know as the famous drama of the english renaissance and even later at the italian renaissance so i that's why this era is so important um even though and there are some extent plays that still survived again there's this play every man which is which is quite excellent i encourage you on my i i will include three links in the module in the study information um study activities for this module uh two of them are about the york mystery plays which is a tradition that still goes on today in york england both the cycle of the pageant wagons uh that we talked about with the mystery plays as well as a more serious um production oriented uh piece so there's two videos that sort of let you see what those look like and then there's a third video which is actually a contemporary production of one of these morality plays every man done from portland community college uh several years back which is a stunning production very visual and if you have time i would just take a glance at it to get an idea of what these things could look like and how creative they can be all right that is the end of this unit i will have a small video to help you to walk you through your first writing assignment so you're going to want to watch that if you have any questions about the writing assignment and next stop is going to be shakespeare and elizabethan england all right thank you so much

good afternoon we are going to skip ahead we&#39;re still in module 3 but we&#39;re going to skip ahead several centuries from uh the fall of the ancient roman empire uh and we&#39;re going to be looking at medieval theater traditions today again based in europe uh later on in the course we&#39;ll talk about some uh simultaneous theater traditions that were going on elsewhere in the world but right now we&#39;re still in continental europe and and england and we&#39;re going to be looking at the middle ages or medieval theater by the way i will use those terms synonymously middle ages or middle medieval theater and we&#39;re basically talking about the period from about 980 to 1500 a.d um this is a time when uh we&#39;re not gonna read a play based in this unit but we we this is a bridge a bridge time period in terms of the development of theater that gets us from classical ancient greece and rome um theater to renaissance theater so it&#39;s important that we study that transition period that took place in the medieval times in order to determine and see how things developed in the renaissance that that became some of the most famous uh pieces of theater that we know today all right so we&#39;re going to get started with medieval theater and um we first want to talk about medieval society as as you can see from this um painting uh which you i don&#39;t know if you can tell from the blur but this is basically a king pulling off his crown to salute the the bishop or the pope um that is greeting him and uh this demonstrates one of the most important things that we want to remember please note this the power of the roman catholic church in the medieval society and the middle ages all aspects of society and social life are governed by the roman catholic church the pope has more power than any king um kings would literally curry favor with the pope in order to get what they want so a lot of wealth is amassed by the church a lot of political power and even um the pope and the vatican had armies that fought for it and took part in wars they were major players the church was the major player in all aspects of social life during the middle ages and we&#39;ll see how that even affects theater as well education was fairly non-existent in fact the only people that really needed to get educated or learn how to read were the clergy people in the church um the church became the repository for all books for all knowledge this is before really the printing presses invented in the late 1400s so things are hand written by monks in monasteries or by nuns in convents interestingly women could get educated if they wanted to become a nun but there really was no need to teach um certainly peasants but even farmers or even some nobles some nobility did not need to know how to read or any kind of education so long as they knew how to fight and supposedly govern their people um public health and safety is again pretty much non-existent you were reliant upon your local lord or baron for protection from um the neighboring baron or lord the feudal system was in play here or you relied upon the church um public health this is the era of the plagues right towns and systems and cities were wiped out by plagues almost every decade and your life expectancy was very low as a normal person um and this has an effect on their world view as well right uh the notion of i&#39;m lucky to be alive is very different than our current contemporary notion of how long do we you know we we try to um keep life going using science and medicine and all these things to ripe old ages and um that was not the case back then class the class structure there really was not yet a large middle class um or a large merchant class that starts developing during the middle ages during the medieval society and that&#39;s going to affect theater as well so we basically have peasants who are uneducated and illiterate who are working the farms and and tending to their families and then we have the nobility the barons the the lords um and and the church existing there as well but those are really the classes that exist um there is certainly no there aren&#39;t a factories there are no workers there&#39;s no working class and there&#39;s as i said a very small but growing middle class of let&#39;s say merchants or artisans or trades people so the church has this big problem of how do we reach the people and how do we teach the people how do we get the peasants and the commoners to behave and to learn um scripture etc how do we how do we access this if they can&#39;t read and we&#39;re not printing bibles to hand out to them how are we going to teach um the right way to go about uh living and of course the answer as you may have guessed is through theater so please note we have three major types of theater that occurred during the middle ages and i&#39;m generalizing but in general we could say three major types the first was called liturgical drama and as you can see from that picture liturgical drama was based inside of um it was performed inside of the churches it was sponsored by the churches and it was chanted in latin because that was the language of the church the bible was written in latin the priests chanted in latin and prayed in latin um this was and what&#39;s funny about that is that even at the time latin was already a dead language the people in germany didn&#39;t speak latin the people in england didn&#39;t speak latin you only spoke latin for the prayers and the hymnals when you got into church so while these plays depicted stories from the bible either the old testament new testament or stories of the saints lives by the way uh these were also called mystery plays if they were took place in the old testament or miracle plays if they were from the new testament or the saints lives so again that&#39;s mystery and miracle plays but again they were right now chanted in latin and that didn&#39;t make much sense because the people didn&#39;t speak latin so next we evolved into what&#39;s called vernacular religious drama and vernacular is just a long word meaning language of the people some today might call it slang or lower class talking lower class speech but again all that it means is the language of the people the language that people spoke and so here these were actually performed outdoors usually outside the church in a town square and you can see in this picture they were usually performed on these wagons that could travel and tour from town to town but then also could unfold and become the stage where the where the piece was performed this became very useful and practical um they were spoken in the native language of wherever they were performed so in germany vernacular religious drama the miracle plays or the mystery plays were performed in german and in england they were performed in english and in italy they were performed in italian so these were much more accessible to the normal people to the peasants and achieved the purpose which was to teach the peasants the stories of the bible and moral behavior they were sponsored by the town trade guilds these growing middle class merchants maybe the cobblers the shoemakers or the tanners the leather makers wine makers etc and they would pick and choose their stories very purposefully so for example the story of noah&#39;s ark perhaps the town trade guild of all the ship builders would sponsor that performance um and they could say you know this was a kind of advertising the the york shipbuilders are bringing you this play about the most famous shipbuilder of all noah so that was used very strategically and again these still focus these were the mystery and miracle plays that focused on the bible and saints stories and the third type which is a little bit different is called the morality plays which were not miracle and mystery plays the morality plays were performed outside or inside they were very flexible they did not have big set pieces or anything like that also performed in the native language like vernacular religious drama and often they were sponsored by a wealthy patron or a political leader just like in ancient rome to curry favor with the people or to say look at how generous and magnanimous i&#39;m being i am sponsoring um i&#39;m i&#39;m the producer i&#39;m sponsoring this um production and they were fables or allegories that were very simplistic tales that symbolized um normal people sort of an everyman character or an everyday character who encounters forces let&#39;s say charity or jealousy or other kinds of emotions or abstract concepts that were then personified and they would tell a story about good versus evil so for example in the tale of every man this character every man is told you&#39;re going to die you need to find one friend to go with to die with you you have to find one friend to take with you to the afterlife and so he goes around and he you know asks his friend um his friend wealth hey wealth will you come with me to the afterlife and wealth says well no i&#39;m a little busy right now and i&#39;m not gonna come with you to heaven he says oh okay i guess wealth won&#39;t stick with me when i die how about um false friends hey false you know friendship hey friendship will you come with me to the afterlife and friendship says no no i&#39;ve got other things to do and so of course he realizes friends don&#39;t stick with you when you die and finally he befriend he finds the character good deeds or charitable works and he says good deeds will you come with me in the afterlife and good deed says i will stick with you always the moral of the story being if you perform good deeds during your life you will get into heaven and and have a good afterlife so these were sort of again allegorical teaching pedantic plays meant to teach moral behavior and these three types of drama really were what made up medieval trauma some noteworthy things about this time period um the actors were all amateur townspeople volunteers but a playmaster or director was usually hired so in each town again if the vernacular religious drama came through on the wagons um they would have a director attached to each play so that it had a little bit of um uh dramatic worth um and and this beast became especially the touring that the wagons touring from town to town these became um highlights of the year was you know oh my gosh mama mama let&#39;s go see uh jonah and the whale has come to town or abraham and isaac is here or the the story uh the crucifixion is here um i loved that when they did it last year let&#39;s go see so these became very very fun for the townspeople um they had a lot of special effects which were called secrets that was the term given to special effects in medieval theater um they might involve trap doors uh in the wagon where for example the devil character could pop up from underneath the wagon or flames might come up from underneath the wagon flying an angel etc uh there was one production of noah&#39;s ark that took place in belgium where they actually flooded the town square they used a bunch of big water barrels to flood the town square in the middle of the play so that was a lot of fun as well don&#39;t ask me where the audience did i have no idea um unlike greek theater which was climactic dramatic structure if you think about it the bible consists of many different episodes and each episode you if in the story of abraham right it doesn&#39;t take place in real time it doesn&#39;t take place in one place they travel from place to place um the story of the exodus of moses right they leave egypt and they come back to the land of canaan well it would be very hard to follow the unities of time place in action if you have to cover 40 years of noah&#39;s ark right the 40 years they sailed 40 days 40 nights etc um or the the locations and there&#39;s many different plots going on because it&#39;s the bible there&#39;s all sorts of different stories so we develop this new we break the unities for the first time and we have this episodic dramatic structure which is sometimes called epic dramatic structure as well and that&#39;s gonna be very important by the time we get to shakespeare we have our first female playwright crossvita of gandersim and i think that&#39;s a very fun name to say she was a nun a german nun who again because they were allowed to be educated and learned to read she actually found the roman comedies of terence you remember the roman playwright terence and she translated them into german and turned them into more appropriate christian themes so sometimes she did a little editing but she adopted these plays and is credited as being the first published female playwright in the history of western theater so i mean still we don&#39;t have female performers but interesting little note there and lastly remember though that low theater that existed outside of the big roman theaters the traveling troops of the jugglers and the mimes and the uh animal acts etc that still survives and that&#39;s still going around largely thanks to the roma people the gypsy people and that tradition is actually what kept a lot of theater alive outside of these mirror mystery and miracle plays um and a lot of the theatrical traditions we know about today are thanks to this exterior or other alternative side of theater kept alive by the gypsy people all right very important to remember and this is why i bring this up this is why this is so important this is the world that shakespeare and his contemporaries and his parents grew up in they studied the classics example for example the greek and roman plays in grade school we&#39;re going to find out that elizabeth in the next unit queen elizabeth started public schooling but they didn&#39;t have anything to read so they read ancient greek and ancient roman plays and poetry they learned from the mystery and the morality plays as children they would have seen shakespeare and his contemporaries would have seen the traveling carts going from town to town performing these stories from the bible and they learned that style they learned that episodic structure and the special effects and the costumes etc they they would have watched that and had enjoyed it as well as they were entertained by those traveling troops with the minds and the juggling and the dancing and the singing shakespeare and his contemporaries incorporated a lot of those kinds of alternative theater styles in their writing it wasn&#39;t just storytelling he incorporated music and um animals right there&#39;s many dogs in shakespearean plays that get a lot of laughs so this these all were there to help create the world that shakespeare and his contemporaries then turned into what we know as the famous drama of the english renaissance and even later at the italian renaissance so i that&#39;s why this era is so important um even though and there are some extent plays that still survived again there&#39;s this play every man which is which is quite excellent i encourage you on my i i will include three links in the module in the study information um study activities for this module uh two of them are about the york mystery plays which is a tradition that still goes on today in york england both the cycle of the pageant wagons uh that we talked about with the mystery plays as well as a more serious um production oriented uh piece so there&#39;s two videos that sort of let you see what those look like and then there&#39;s a third video which is actually a contemporary production of one of these morality plays every man done from portland community college uh several years back which is a stunning production very visual and if you have time i would just take a glance at it to get an idea of what these things could look like and how creative they can be all right that is the end of this unit i will have a small video to help you to walk you through your first writing assignment so you&#39;re going to want to watch that if you have any questions about the writing assignment and next stop is going to be shakespeare and elizabethan england all right thank you so much

Transcript for:Medieval Theater Traditions

Transcript for:
Medieval Theater Traditions