Roman drama, having died a natural death, was buried by Christianity. Tertullian, not without reason, counted plays among the works of the Devil, and although Augustine saw no harm in reading them, they had probably ceased to be acted by the fourth century ad. The great theatres stood empty, and either fell into ruin or were occupied and patched up as warrens of tiny houses, as one can see in the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome today. Throughout the Middle Ages Plautus and Terence went on being read and, if the works of Hroswitha, a tenth-century German nun are any indication, even imitated. But the tradition of performances died out entirely. The new drama that now arose represented a completely new start.

Some time in the tenth century, a part of the Mass for Easter Sunday was embellished by a question and answer sequence telling the story of the Three Maries at the Sepulchre [PI. 26]: ‘Whom do you seek in the Sepulchre, O followers of Christ?’ asks one speaker representing the angel. ‘Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified’, is the reply. ‘He is risen, as he foretold; go and tell how he is risen from the tomb.’

As the years passed, other episodes from the Gospels were dramatized in the same simple way. The performers were priests and choristers, the language Latin, the setting the chancel of the parish church. But the dialogue was working itself free from the actual words of the Biblical text, a few stage properties were introduced and there was action of a sort. Subjects included the Nativity, the Journey to Emmaus, the Ascension and Pentecost. The staging was elaborated so that the whole church, including the nave, was used, with each bay of the arcade representing a particular place (Pilate’s Palace, Gethsemane, etc.). Rich costumes were provided and the characters carried their traditional attributes. In spite of ecclesias­tical controls, comedy kept breaking in and certain characters (for instance the man who sold spices to Mary Magdalene) became recognized comic types.

The breakthrough came when the vernacular replaced Latin and the plays emerged from the churches into the market squares. Drama, in fact, had proved too popular for the church to monopolize it. The plays were taken over by lay people—the craft guilds in England, special fraternities in France (like the famous Confrerie de la Passion, founded in 1402), municipal