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THE MEDIEVAL STAGE AND THE ANTITHEATRICAL PREJUDICE So sithen thise miraclis pleyinge ben onely singnis, . . . they ben not onely contrarious to the worschipe of God—that is, bothe in signe and in dede—but also they ben ginnys of the devvel to cacchen men to byleve of Anticrist.—A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge Condemnation of actors and of the ludic experience as represented in the Wycliffite Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge was not confined only to the radical fringe of Christianity in the late Middle Ages, but rather involved an attitude that was inherited from certain of the Church Fathers and that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries would emerge in the distaste of the theatre evidenced by such Puritans as Phillip Stubbes, William Perkins, and William Prynne.2 The Tretise is, to be sure, an extreme example of antagonism to the stage, and it would be easy to misread its significance as a theatre history document. But the Tretise nevertheless suggests the importance of surveying the matter of medieval hostility to actors and the stage. It will be useful initially to call to mind the fact that a range of dramatic traditions, from dignified and stylized religious ceremony to rowdy secular entertainment, coexisted throughout the period. S o m e of the texts that are studied by students of the drama—e.g., the Visitatio Sepulchri in its simplest 1 A Tretise ofMiraclis Pleyinge, ed. Clifford Davidson, Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Ser., 19 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), p. 99. 2 Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie ofAbuses (London, 1583), sigs. Lvr -Miv ; William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (London, 1633), passim. It will, however, be important to recognize that there was considerable variation in attitude toward the stage among Puritans; not all were entirely hostile, nor was all antagonism to the theater lodged in the Puritan camp. See Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), esp. pp. 18-47. William Perkins, no friend of the theater, was perhaps typical in most disliking religious plays, which, like religious processions and the Roman Catholic Mass itself, are 'vtterly forbidden' {The Workes [London, 1612], 1,17). For Prynne, plays for the stage are 'the very product of Satan, and the broode of Hell' and players 'are the very dregs of men' guilty of every offense including sodomy (Histrio-mastix, pp. 16,133,135). P A R E R G O N ns 14.2 (January 1997) 2 Clifford Davidson liturgical form3 —must be distinguished from the more representational forms, and yet in no sense should the earliest Easter dramas be seen as a step historically on the way to theatrical experiences that would raise the ire of critics from Robert Grosseteste to Prynne. Unfortunately, popular accounts of the medieval stage continue to describe how it evolved out of the liturgy following the total demise of the theatre of antiquity—a theatre which is said to have been suppressed by humorless churchmen—whereupon the acceptance of drama is said to have grown gradually as new forms developed in the church and then moved out first to the church porch and eventually to the streets.4 According to this older view, the medieval actor reclaimed his place in society through a development that took a thousand years to germinate. Unfortunately, the attitude toward the actor and the theatre in the years prior to the Reformation was never so simple. A generation ago O. B. Hardison, Jr., demonstrated that the simplistic evolutionary model fails to fit the historical facts.5 While the theatre as the ancient Romans knew it was indeed suppressed following a period of decadence, the offering of entertainments by actors, either one-person entertainers or small troupes, appears to have had a continuous history in Western Europe through the time of the High Middle Ages. Verification comes from various sources, including, most recently, the texts of the Nordic sagas and related documents which report the popularity of the leikarar, w h o were admired and w h o yet existed on the margins of Scandinavian society.6 Such entertainers, though often rewarded with rich gifts of clothing which they might...

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