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The category of "medieval theatre" is vast, covering dramatic performance in Europe over a thousand-year period. A broad spectrum of genres needs to be considered, including mystery plays, morality plays, farces and masques. The themes were almost always religious.
The term was widely disseminated by well-known theater historians like Heinrich Alt (Theater und Kirche, 1846), [1] E.K. Chambers (The Mediaeval Stage, 1903) and Karl Young. Young's two-volume monumental work [2] about the medieval church was especially influential. It was published in 1933 and is still read today, even though his theories have ...
Mystery plays and miracle plays (they are distinguished as two different forms although the terms are often used interchangeably [1]) are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song.
The 1522 cover of Mundus et Infans, a morality play. The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts (most often virtues and vices, but sometimes practices or habits) alongside angels and demons, who ...
It is the earliest morality play by more than a century, and the only medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both text and music. A short version of Ordo Virtutum without music appears at the end of Scivias , Hildegard's most famous account of her visions.
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With this as a starting point, medieval theatre makers began crafting other plays detailing the religious narratives of Christianity. Plays about saints, especially local saints, were particularly popular in England. These plays conformed to the goals of contemporary historians, often closely paralleling "Lives of the Saints" books.
French theatre in the 16th-century followed the same patterns of evolution as the other literary genres of the period. For the first decades of the century, public theatre remained largely tied to its long medieval heritage of mystery plays, morality plays, farces, and soties, although the miracle play was no longer in vogue.