Theatre History Notes

Theatre History Notes

…answers would be sung by two halves of the choir. The tropes were eventually shifted from the Mass to the services of the hours, particularly Matins, the service before daybreak. From a tenth-century manuscript found in the monastery of St. Gall. Reproduced in Medieval and Tudor Drama, ed. John Gassner (1963: New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987), 35.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 C.E., the Roman provinces lost contact with the dramatic tradition that the Romans had inherited from the Greeks and spread to all their colonies from the Indus River in Asia to the northern forests of what is now Germany and west to Ireland. The Christian church had spread with the empire, too, but it tended to persist in the remnants of the old regime, now run by local tribal chiefs. The Latin-speaking clerics still had manuscripts of Roman drama, and clearly they must have preserved some hidden dramatic performances for themselves, but the church’s dramatic theater was entirely subsumed in the performance of the sacraments, Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Orders, and Matrimony. By the tenth century C.E., bishops apparently had begun authorizing the dramatization of some parts of the biblical narrative as an inducement to parishioners to experience the lessons with more feeling. From the shallow root of the first recorded dramatic embellishment or “trope,” called “quem quaeritis” after its first words, a tradition of English sacred drama emerged that fused with revivals of classical drama in the sixteenth century to create the “Elizabethan drama” of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. *
Two choirs, usually situated on opposite sides of the nave or cross-bar of the cathedral, or on opposite sides of the church doors, address each other with the first two and second two lines of this short…

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