The Ordo Virtutum: Ancestor of the English Moralities?

The Ordo Virtutum: Ancestor of the English Moralities? Robert Potter Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (c.l 151 ) is one of the masterpieces of medieval music drama and arguably the first morality play, but it has been shamefully neglected by generations of scholars. My book The English Morality Play, an unfortunate case in point, mentions the Ordo Virtutum only in a hurried footnote. It is hardly exceptional; such standard authorities as Young, Chambers, Curtius, Hardison, Collins and Smoldon seem to have been unaware of Hildegard and her play's existence. 1 In the last two decades, however, thanks both to the scholarship of Peter Dronke and new critical sensitivity to the artistic achievements of women in the Middle Ages, Hildegard of Bingen has emerged spectacularly from her post-medieval obscurity . We see Hildegard today as a brilliant twelfth-century renaissance figure, a lyrical mystic who not merely set down her visions poetically (with Papal blessing), but also corresponded with the great public figures of her day (Frederick Barbarossa and Eleanor of Aquitaine, among others), composed music, and wrote learned treatises on medicine, ethics, natural history, and cosmology.2 It is equally imperative now that we give Hildegard's dramatic work the attention it deserves—and that we consider the possible connections between her music drama and the subsequent moralities. Placed by her aristocratic family in a convent at the age of eight, Hildegard of Bingen spent the rest of her life as a cloistered nun, much of it as abbess of her own convent in the Rhineland, near where she had been born in 1098. For the ROBERT POTTER is Professor of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1984-85 he was Visiting Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury. 201 202Comparative Drama use of her nuns, she composed a remarkable liturgical song cycle of some seventy pieces—sequences, hymns, antiphons—completed about 1151 and entitled Symphonia armonie celestium revelationem, "The Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations." It concludes with a liturgical music drama, the Ordo Virtutum, which doubtless also was intended for performance by the nuns. The subject of the play is highly unusual for a liturgical drama; indeed it is unique, for it presents no biblical event, saint's life, or miracle, but instead it contains an allegorical struggle between personified virtues and the Devil over the destiny of a human soul. Both the theme and form of the Ordo Virtutum show a marked resemblance to the later moralities. Audrey Ekdahl Davidson, the Ordo's most recent editor, summarizes its structure as follows: 1.An introduction in which the Virtues are identified to the Patriarchs and Prophets. 2.A "scene" in which the Soul enters and is seduced by the Devil. 3.A "scene" in which there is more expansion on the nature of the characters of the Virtues. 4.A "scene" in which the Soul returns and repents. 5.A penultimate section in which the Devil is bound and God the Father is praised. 6.The closing, a strange mystical passage. . . .3 Thus a full two hundred years before the earliest vernacular morality texts, we have a dramatic confrontation between forces of personified good and evil. Further, it is not in the epic form of an allegorical combat, as in Prudentius' Psychomachia, but rather in the dramatic form of a contest for the allegiance of a mutable human entity. The Soul, pure and yet torn by conflicting impulses, is beguiled by the Devil into sin, but eventually comes to repent and be embraced by the Virtues. The similarity of the Ordo to plays like The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Wisdom begins with its focus on the progress of the Soul from innocence into sin and on to repentance—the pattern of action which embodies the definitive structure of the later vernacular moralities. Repentance is the defining theme and action of all these plays, and the Ordo assuredly enacts a similar dramatic message. Like the later moralities, the Ordo has a largely allegorical cast of characters—personified virtues, a central figure or figures who will epitomize the human condition, and the Devil as Robert Potter203...