The Dark Ages to the Dawn of the Renaissance

Dark Ages 476 – 1000 CE

• New Comedy survives in the

form of puppet plays
• In Constantinople, ancient
tragic plays may have been
used to teach Greek
• Troupes of storytellers,
dancers, magicians, animal
trainers, acrobats, and Mary Evans Picture Library

jugglers roamed Europe

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 Hroswitha (ca. 935-1001 CE)
• First known woman
playwright in Europe
• A nun who used the
plays of Terence as a
model to write plays
about the lives of saintly
women
• She replaced Terence’s
sexual innuendo with
themes of Christian
AKG London

values and morals

2
 Liturgical Drama in the
Middle Ages – 1000-1200 CE
• Tropes were chanted or sung
phrases incorporated into the
Mass as a way to dramatize a
religious lesson
• Short plays became
reenactments of popular parts
of the Bible, like the Nativity or

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the Death and Resurrection of
Christ
• Often performed as a part of
the Mass by the priests
themselves
3
High Middle Ages Types of plays
1200 – 1450 CE • Mystery Plays
• The Second
Shepherd’s Play
• Miracle Plays
• Morality Plays
• Everyman
Allegory was common
element in all.

Festival of Corpus Christi—Pope Urban announced that plays

would be allowed on this day
Pageant wagons—Pulled in front of audience in the town
square and used as a stage
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 Aristotle’s Aristotelian Scholasticism Philosophy

Islam is founded in 610 CE by the prophet Muhammad (ca.

570-632 CE) From 711 to 1492, Islam dominated much of
Spain

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) adopts and teaches

Aristotle’s doctrine of the Four Causes that brought order to
the world:
(1) material cause- things we want of the world
(2) formal cause - pattern that governs a particular
thing i.e our humanity (generous behavior)
(3) efficient cause- what consequence it means to be
human
(4) final cause - is the goal or purpose toward which
a thing is oriented. 5
Towards a More Secular Theatre
• Interludes
• Short nonreligious plays inserted in larger
court entertainments
• Incorporated elements of dance, song, and
spectacle to enhance their theatrical value
• Transition from religious plays to secular plays
in Europe took hundreds of years

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The Renaissance Begins
•In 1453, after a six-week siege, Constantinople (called
Istanbul today), the head of the Eastern Roman Empire, fell
to the Ottoman Turks. The victor, Mehmet II, ordered
Christian sanctuaries to be made into mosques.

•As the Turks ransacked the city, they burned

Constantinople’s libraries, which contained thousands of
manuscripts from classical Greece.

•A few of the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles

were saved. These plays, together with the manuscripts that
survived the fall of Muslim Spain, would contribute to the
growth of knowledge during the Renaissance.

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The Invention of the Printing Press
— sometime between 1440 and 1450

•Before the Printing Press

•Monks and religious hand-wrote books in
monasteries
•Most people could not read
•A prominent scholar or physician might own a
handful of books, and a famous professor or
wealthy merchant might own two or three
•Books were chained to lecterns at universities,
and professors read from them to students–the
source of the term lecture

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The Invention of the Printing Press
•The printing press was the
beginning of mass media and the
popularization of ideas

•By 1515, all the known works of

ancient Greek authors had been
translated and printed

•Commedia (stock characters)

was first seen in the 1500s
during the Italian Renaissance.
However, its true dates and
origins are a mystery.
It did appear in early Persia9
Humanism
•Was a vibrant intellectual movement that grew out
of 15th century Italy

•Education based on church-approved theology was

replaced with an emphasis on the liberal arts

•Humanists idolized the ancient Romans and Greeks

•Humanists worked to strengthen the awareness and

claims of the individual; were interested in self-
development, not pious passivity

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The Demise of Religious Theatre
•Martin Luther, a catholic priest (1483-1546) German
theologian and religious reformer who was the
catalyst of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
He challenged the Catholic Church practices with 95
Complaints
• By the 17th century, there were over 200
Protestant sects
•Politics responds to liturgical drama except for
Spain, most major European countries banned
religious drama due to alternative interpretations of
the Bible. Many called for a stable, secular political
order and more secular theatre
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a (Mystery) Play: Crash Course
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VI3qcSuUlk&t=74s
The most famous play Everyman of
the Middle Ages that is still
performed today because it has one
message - you are going to die.

The play Everyman uses allegory. (the expression by means of symbolic

fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human
existence, a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a
hidden meaning, typically moral) The play opens with
a messenger calling for the audience’s attention to this “moral play.”
Next God appears, lamenting the unworthiness of humans, who no
longer revere him and who sinfully indulge in greed and lust. Deciding
to make people account for their sins, God orders Death to
summon Everyman so that he can be judged by his “reckoning,” a
ledger of his good and ill deeds. However, when Death approaches
Everyman on earth, Everyman is unwilling to die and unprepared for his
reckoning. Clinging to the life he had, Everyman begs Death for more
time. Death refuses, but he allows Everyman to seek a companion for
his “pilgrimage,” if he can find someone willing to accompany him to12 the
afterlife.