Atalanta in Calydon

The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne is probably best known for his 1866 book Poems and Ballads, but the year before that he published a rather curious verse drama called Atalanta in Calydon.

Just as Swinburne's hero Percy Shelley had written Prometheus Unbound inspired by a lost play by Aeschylus, Atalanta in Calydon takes as its jumping-off point a lost play by Euripides, Meleager. At the beginning of his own drama, Swinburne quotes a Greek fragment from Meleager, roughly translated as: "Do good to them while they live, for every man when he is dead is earth and shade, and nothingness comes to nothing."

Atalanta in Calydon tries to mimic Greek tragedy in form as well as content. Greek dramas typically began with a prologue prior to the entrance of the chorus. In some cases, like Antigone by Sophocles, this prologue was a dialogue between two characters, but Euripides frequently had a single actor relating the prologue, often portraying a character who might never again appear in the play. This is what Swinburne does, having a "Chief Huntsman" recite a hymn to Artemis at the beginning of the play.

The huntress goddess is also honored by the chorus, which sings a classical parados while entering. Their opening lines are frequently anthologized:

     When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,

         The mother of months in meadow or plain

     Fills the shadows and windy places

         With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;

     And the brown bright nightingale amorous

     Is half assuaged for Itylus,

     For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,

         The tongueless vigil and all the pain.

The fact that the chorus is singing about Philomela and Procne hardly bodes well. To avenge the rape of her sister Philomela, Procne murdered her own son Itylus and fed his flesh to her husband, the King of Thrace, who was also Philomela's rapist. In the world of this play, children are precious, but siblings more so.

Atalanta, the title character, is not so much the protagonist of the play as is Althea. The legendary mother of Meleager, Althea had heard the Fates say that her son's life would only last as long as a brand burning in the fire. She plucked the brand from the fire, doused its flames, and preserved it so that her son might live. Althea relates this story to the chorus, who then sing a new hymn:

     Before the beginning of years

         There came to the making of man

     Time, with a gift of tears;

         Grief, with a glass that ran;

     Pleasure, with pain for heaven;

         Summer, with flowers that fell;

     Remembrance fallen from heaven,

         And madness risen from hell;

     Strength without hands to smite;

         Love that endures for a breath:

     Night, the shadow of light,

         And life, the shadow of death.

This grim view of existence precedes the entrance of Meleager, who catalogs all of the heroes assembled to hunt the famous Calydonian boar that is wreaking havoc on the land. It is only after the chorus sings another hymn that Atalanta finally enters. Meleager praises her virtue and beauty, but the other members of the hunting party just want him to shut up so they can go after the boar.

Atalanta is a great huntress, which is why Meleager invited her along on the boar hunt to begin with, but the men want nothing to do with her. Meleager's sexist uncle Plexippus goads him, saying, "Why, if she ride among us for a man, / Sit thou for her and spin; a man grown girl / Is worth a woman weaponed...." Later, he suggests the way she can help with the hunt is by being a human sacrifice. Atalanta speaks up for herself, though, and proclaims her own worthiness.

Ultimately, Atalanta not only joins in with the hunt, but even helps to kill the boar. After Althea gets this news, however, she receives darker tidings. Her two brothers have been killed, and by the hands of her own son. A messenger relates how Meleager tried to give the boar's head and hide to Atalanta, but this enraged Plexippus and his brother Toxeus, who assaulted her. Defending Atalanta, Meleager killed both his uncles, an act that sends Althea into a rage.

Of course, Althea had the means to exact revenge on her son. She burns the brand she once plucked from the fire, and Meleager wastes away and dies. Greek tragedies frequently ended with a kommos, or mixed song shared by both the chorus and main characters. During the final kommos in Atalanta in Calydon, Meleager and Atalanta say their final farewells, and then the young man enters eternal night.

Swinburne went on to write other plays in imitation of older styles, and Poems and Ballads contains a verse drama called The Masque of Queen Bersabe, written in a medieval style and subtitled A Miracle-Play. The poetry of Atalanta in Calydon has had a longer-lasting impact, though.

The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene

A manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford contains a unique miracle play about the life of Saint Mary Magdalene. The manuscript, known as "Digby 133" for its 17th-century donor, seems to be imperfectly copied, but it gives us some fascinating insights into medieval drama.

The Digby Mary Magdalene portrays its protagonist as coming from a wealthy family. Her father Syrus even owns his own castle, but when he dies, grief sends Mary into a downward spiral. The Seven Deadly Sins, sensing the weakness of her emotional state, all come after her and eventually have to be exorcised by Jesus.

As is the case with many medieval plays, allegorical figures make numerous appearances, and not just the Seven Deadly Sins. The sins of Pride and Covetousness attend a character known as World. Another allegorical character, Flesh, rules over Sloth, Gluttony, and Lechery. The Devil himself appears as well, attended by Wrath and Envy.

Magdalene Castle is assailed, and Lechery gets inside, along with a character known as Bad Angel. Mary complains to Lechery of her grief for her father, and the sin advises her to engage in "sportes whych best doth yow plese." Traveling to Jerusalem with Lechery as her companion, Mary goes to a tavern and meets a young man named Curiosity.

According to the Bad Angel, Curiosity is none other than Pride, and Mary grants him all his requests. Fortunately, Good Angel shows up to awaken her conscience, and the saint repents, falling at the feet of Jesus and anointing the Lord with ointment. Jesus orders the seven devils out of Mary. They depart, and together with the Bad Angel "enter into hell with thondyr."

Hellmouths frequently show up in medieval drama, but this one appears to have been particularly impressive. A stage direction indicates: "Here xal the tother deylles sette the howse one a fyere..." Presumably, the set for hell actually had real pyrotechnics! This isn't the only use of special effects, though. In the second half of the play, Mary takes a sea journey, which is one of several shipboard scenes. The ship apparently moved, since there are stage directions like "Her goth the shep owt of the place."

Over the course of the play, pagan idols tremble, and a cloud from heaven sets a temple ablaze. Later, Mary goes out into the wilderness to fast and pray, and angels descend with a sacred host to nourish her. We think of our own theatre as being technologically advanced, but it might not have been a match for what theatre artists were doing way back during the middle ages!

Early Tudor Drama

As the middle ages in England came to a close, the Plantagenet dynasty split into two factions: the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The two sides repeatedly clashed in the long conflict known as the Wars of the Roses, with the young Henry Tudor ultimately triumphing and establishing a new Tudor Dynasty.

Though drama under Henry VII still maintained a medieval sensibility, times were changing. The printing press had already been introduced, and Renaissance ideas that had flourished in Italy were finally reaching England. Under the reign of the king's son, Henry VIII, secular drama gained considerable ground, with the gifted English playwright John Heywood providing such interludes as The Play of the Weather and The Four P's.

Another important playwright from Henry's reign was John Bale. His play King Johan tells the story (from a decidedly Protestant standpoint) of a notorious medieval monarch's conflict with the Pope. King Johan is notable both for its unique verse structure and its mixing together of historical and allegorical figures. The play exists in multiple versions, and a reference in one to "our late kynge Henrye" could indicate it was performed during the reign of Edward VI as well. Bale was highly regarded under Edward, and the young king appointed him as a bishop.

Sometime around the end of Edward's reign, the schoolmaster Nicholas Udall wrote the comedy Ralph Roister Doister. The play focuses on the dramatic descendant of the Miles Gloriosus character in Plautus, depicting a braggart who tries to woo a virtuous widow but ends up running away from her maids. The play appears to have been intended for performance by Udall's students, though it may have been performed before Mary I as well. By the time Elizabeth I took the throne, there was already a healthy tradition of secular plays in England.

That proved to be fortunate, as Elizabeth set about banning all religious drama. The mystery, miracle, and morality plays of the middle ages advocated a Catholic theology, and Elizabeth's legitimacy depended on Henry VIII's ability as head of the church to obtain an annulment without the consent of the Pope. As Elizabeth began the long, slow process of repressing religious plays, more and more writers turned to secular themes. Two men, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, collaborated on a play in 1561 called Gorboduc. The tragedy is the first drama in English written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, which subsequently became the standard verse form for Elizabethan plays.

Elizabethan drama did not truly come into its own, however, until the 1580s. One of the first plays to capture the imaginations of mass audiences was The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. The play, about a father who must avenge the murder of his son, established the popularity of revenge tragedy. Kyd provided ghosts, mad scenes, a play-within-a-play, and a final bloody slaughter. All of these became staples of later Elizabethan revenge tragedies, and Kyd might even have written an early version of the most popular of revenge tragedies: William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Kyd was overshadowed in 1587, though, with the appearance of a young playwright from Cambridge University named Christopher Marlowe. That is a post, however, for another day.

Notes on Spain's Golden Age

Early Spanish Drama

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain asserted its power across the globe. It dominated Europe, conquered much of the Americas, and established footholds in Africa and Asia. Spanish literature and the arts flourished, and the theatre in Spain came into its own. Religious dramas grew into elaborate pageants called autos sacramentales that celebrated the sacraments of the Church. Secular drama, influenced by French farces and Italian commedia dell'arte, spread across the peninsula. These plays were frequently performed by traveling troupes that could consist of anything from a single actor reciting stock pieces to refined companies with as many as sixteen actors.

Both men and women acted, though there were fewer actresses on stage, and boys frequently played the lesser female roles. The most famous of these early strolling players was Lope de Rueda, the son of a goldsmith who rose to fame as an actor in the middle of the sixteenth century. He was famous for playing comic characters and also wrote many of his own plays. These works ranged from full-length sweeping dramas to short farces called pasos, for which he was most famous. Popular folk humor was the basis for many of these pasos, including The Olives, a play about a husband and wife arguing over how much to charge for olives that will grow from a newly planted shoot.

One of the many people to see Rueda was Miguel de Cervantes, who later recalled that when he was a boy he had witnessed the great actor perform a play on a simple stage made up of four or five boards on benches with a blanket used as a backdrop. Cervantes later became famous for his novel Don Quixote, but before that, he wrote numerous plays, including the four-act historical drama The Siege of Numantia. The play uses allegorical figures such as War, Hunger, Pestilence, and Fame, as well as historical figures like the Roman general Scipio. There are plenty of opportunities for pageantry, such as a woman representing Spain entering crowned with towers and bearing a castle in her hand. Stage directions also call for complicated special effects, including shooting off rockets to represent lightning and rolling a tub full of stones to create the sound of thunder.

In between the acts of such serious plays, performers often staged interludes called entermeses. Later on in his career, Cervantes published eight of these entermeses. One of the more famous of these, The Vigilant Sentinel, shows the author's ironic stance toward soldiers and chivalric values. In the play, a soldier courts a kitchen maid, chasing away any men who might even possibly be rivals. In spite of his efforts (or perhaps because of them) she rejects his suit and marries instead a sacristan who knows nothing of the arts of war.

The Spanish Stage 

The improvised stages of traveling players continued throughout the Golden Age of Spanish drama. However, the larger cities in Spain established permanent playhouses. In 1574, the Italian architect Giovanni Bellini built Spain's first permanent theatre of the period in Seville. Others followed in Cordoba, Valencia, Madrid, and elsewhere. Spanish theatres tended to be built in preexisting courtyards, earning them the name corrales. In the town of Almagro, one of these corrales still exists and is used for theatre even today.

On one side of the corrale was the stage, which had a balcony or balconies for entrances from above. The Siege of Numantia calls for a character to leap from a tower, an effect likely achieved using one of these balconies. Like public theaters in England, these stages had few scenic elements, which allowed actors to travel across miles or years in the space of a few lines. Audience members wishing to be seen could sit on stage for an additional fee, occupying areas to the side of the stage referred to as mountains. At the back of the stage was frequently a discovery space where a curtain could open to reveal additional characters or a new scene.

Directly in front of the stage was an open courtyard known as the patio. Originally men stood in this area, though gradually theatres added benches. Only men were allowed in the patio, and these were the rowdy, lower-class playgoers known as mosqueteros. Frequently, it was the mosqueteros who decided the success or failure of a play, and writers were obliged to please them. If the mosqueteros did not like a play, they hissed and whistled until it could not be heard.

Facing the stage was an elevated gallery for women, who were kept separate from the rough men in the patio. This area, known as the cazuela, or "stew pot," had benches that were frequently fought over by the female playgoers. To sit in the front, where a woman could be easily seen by men, was considered brazen, but it was hard to see from the back rows, so women came early to the theatre to get one of the middle seats. Sometimes, there was another level above the cazuela reserved for dignitaries. Below the cazuela was typically the refreshment stand, or alojeria, which also sent sellers up to the cazuela to hawk snacks.

On either side of the patio were rows of seats rising up at an incline. These were known as the gradas, and an extra charge was required for these seats. Unfortunately, many playgoers felt they were entitled to such seats--and indeed to admission period--without paying. It was a constant struggle to keep order in the gradas as well as the patio. Also, actors did not own the corrales. They were either paid a flat fee or kept only a portion of the admission charge, so freeloaders could cut painfully into the income of performers.

Above the gradas were boxes known as aposentos. These originally connected to the houses on either side of the courtyard in which the corrale was built. They sometimes had private entrances through the houses, which led to complex arrangements with the homeowners, who typically took a cut of the admission for these seats. The aposentos were the only places where women and men could sit together, but a respectable woman would only go to the theatre in the company of family members. The top levels of aposentos were sometimes called attics, or desvanes.

Originally, theatres only performed plays on Sundays and during religious festivals, but beginning in 1579 authorities began making exceptions. Performances were not allowed at all during Lent, however, or during periods of national mourning. The corrales had to shut down for the hottest part of the summer, and they were closed as a matter of course during plagues or wars. This meant they could remain open fewer than 200 days out of the year. Since the corrales were open to the sky, rain could also spoil a performance.

Lope de Vega

The one man who shaped Spanish Golden Age drama more than anyone else was the playwright Lope de Vega. Born in Madrid in 1562, he came to write literally hundreds of plays and became so famous that most critics are now on a first-name basis with him, referring to him simply as Lope. Lope studied at the University of Alcala, but never completed his degree. He became a soldier and fought in numerous military expeditions, including the ill-fated Spanish Armada that launched in 1588 to invade England. Lope's ship was one of the few to make it back to Spain, an example of his prodigious good luck, which got him out of numerous scrapes and close calls throughout his life.

Before Lope's time, Spanish plays had any number of acts. Lope, however, found that three acts worked best for him. Once he established three acts as the standard for himself, both his tremendous skill and incredible output led other Spanish writers to adopt the three-act form as well. He specialized is so-called cape and sword dramas, which valued swashbuckling action and ingenious plot twists over complex characterizations or overly decorous poetry. This led many critics to attack his plays, frequently citing his failure to follow neoclassical rules.

In response, Lope published The New Art of Writing Plays for Our Time in 1609. Written in verse, this defense of free and inventive playwriting imitates the informal style of Horace's Ars Poetica. Though Lope apologizes for breaking neoclassical rules, he slyly counters that had he followed those rules his plays would not have been nearly so popular. While abasing himself before classical scholars, he also throws in jabs about how he actually has experience writing plays, and very successful ones at that. Anyone who does not like his plays need not come see them, he notes.

The New Art also gives a great deal of practical advice about playwriting. It recommends writing each act on no more than four sheets of paper, as any more would test the patience of the audience. Rather than condemning the entire play to take place in a single day, the poem recommends confining each act to a single day. The first act should set out the matter of the play, and the second act should weave together events, but only in such a manner that the audience will not be able to guess the outcome. Only in the final scene should the play's ending become apparent.

Unlike English drama, which settled upon blank verse as the standard poetic form for writing plays, Spanish Golden Age drama was written in a variety of styles. In fact, the verse form typically changed throughout a single play. The New Art suggests fitting the verse form to the mood of each scene. For instance, complaining characters should use ten-line stanzas called decimas. A character waiting in anticipation might speak in a sonnet, while grave matter might be related in three-line tercets.

One of Lope's most famous plays is Fuenteovejuna. The play is inspired by actual events in the town of Fuenteovejuna, whose name roughly translates to "The Sheep's Well." A sadistic commander torments the town, raping and torturing villagers with impunity. Eventually, a group of villagers kill the commander, and the king orders that the murderers be punished. Even under torture, however, the villagers refuse to name names, calling out only, "Fuenteovejuna did it!" Lope depicted an even more famous event from Spanish history in The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus.

Another play, The Dog in the Manger (or The Gardener's Dog), plays off of an old fable about a dog who will not eat hay but refuses to let others eat it, either. In the play, a noble woman falls in love with her secretary. While she does not want to marry him, she prevents him from marrying anyone else until a wily servant tricks everyone into thinking the secretary is the long-lost son of a noble. Lope created a darker outcome for The Knight of Olmedo, the story of a virtuous gentlemen who beats all of his rivals to win the heart of a lady in Medina. Out of revenge, the spurned lovers shoot and kill him as he is riding back to Olmedo.

Lope's reputation was beginning to fade when at the age of 68 he wrote the play Justice Without Revenge (sometimes titled in English Lost in a Mirror). At the time he wrote it, his daughter Marcela had already gone mad and was in the process of slowly dying. Though honor prevails in the play, it is at a great price, and the dark, passionate drama won new respect for Lope. Justice Without Revenge has many parallels with Jacobean revenge tragedy, and in fact Lope wrote his own version of the events depicted in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. In Lope's The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward, however, the mood tends to be pastoral until the play's bloody final act.

Lope's Contemporaries

Though Lope dominated the stage during his lifetime, Spain's Golden Age produced a number of other important plays and playwrights. The author Guillen de Castro transformed the epic Spanish poem The Cid into the play The Youthful Deeds of the Cid, which came in turn to inspire the French playwright Pierre Corneille. Castro also wrote plays based on classical mythology as well as some inspired by the prose of Cervantes. Lope dedicated one of his plays to him, and he dedicated the first volume of his plays to Lope's daughter. Unfortunately, Castro was not as successful as his friend, and he died in poverty.

The friar Gabriel Tellez, better known by his pseudonym Tirso de Molina, wrote a number of popular plays around the same time as Lope. His most famous work, The Trickster of Seville, introduced to literature the character of Don Juan, a charismatic womanizer who devotes his life to seducing women. In the play, Don Juan kills the father of a young woman he has seduced and later invites the dead man to supper. When the father does show up, Don Juan is dragged off to hell without the chance of repenting of his sins. Playwrights from Moliere to George Bernard Shaw to David Ives have retold the classic story, though often lending it very different interpretations.

The Mexican-born Juan Ruis de Alarcon churned out about 25 of plays, including The Suspicious Truth, about a compulsive liar. Like Castro, Alarcon later influenced Corneille. He was a friend of Cervantes, but won the enmity of Lope, who lampooned him. A short, hunchbacked redhead, Alarcon stood out in Spanish society. Eventually, however, he was appointed to the Royal Council of the Indies and achieved relative stability through his position in government.

By far the most important of Lope's contemporaries was Pedro Calderon de la Barca. By the time Calderon was born in 1600, Lope had already established himself as a playwright, so while the two were contemporaries, Calderon came from a very different generation. While Lope developed Spanish drama from its rough-and-tumble origins to the form it would take throughout the Golden Age, it was Calderon who refined it and brought out its poetry. Lope was the more influential writer, but most critics today consider Calderon to be the better dramatists. In fact, when Lope died in 1635, the young Calderon had already surpassed him in reputation.

Calderon

Like Lope, Calderon was born in Madrid. He was fortunate enough to receive a Jesuit education, but after his father died, Calderon was orphaned at the age of 15. He later studied law at the University of Salamanca. In 1622, he entered a poetry competition in honor of Saint Isidore, who was in the process of being canonized. Not only did Calderon's poetry win first place, it was specifically praised by Lope, who was one of the judges in the competition.

Shortly after that, Calderon's plays began appearing in the corrales. One early play, The Constant Prince, tells the story of the historical Prince Ferdinand of Portugal, who died imprisoned in Morocco due to Portugal's decision not to hand over the city of Ceuta to Muslim forces. The play is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of many Muslim characters, even though Christian forces are ultimately victorious. The role of Ferdinand is demanding, both emotionally and physically, as the young prince is systematically (and willingly) tortured to death. In the twentieth century, the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski used the play to create one of his most famous productions.

In 1635, Calderon wrote his most famous play Life Is a Dream. The play follows the fictional Segismundo, the heir to the throne of Poland. Sigismundo's father, King Basilio, imprisoned the prince due to a prophesy he would bring disaster to the country. Having a change of heart, the king tests Segismundo, bringing him to the palace, but when the prince behaves abominably, King Basilio has him drugged and brought back to his cell where he is told the whole experience was a dream. In the third act, Calderon introduces new plot twists that leave a reformed Segismundo wondering whether all life might indeed be but a dream.

Though most critics consider Life Is a Dream to be Calderon's masterpiece, he continued to produce exceptional works for years afterward. His play The Mighty Magician influenced Goethe's Faust. In such dark plays as The Doctor of His Own Honor Calderon drew out traditions of honor in Spanish society to fantastic and chilling extremes. In 1651, Calderon became a priest. That same year, he wrote The Mayor of Zalamea, one of his last great secular plays.

After taking Holy Orders, Calderon focused on writing explicitly religious plays, the autos sacramentales for Corpus Christi and other religious feasts. However, the king asked him to write entertainments for the court, and Calderon could scarcely refuse. Teaming up with the composer Juan Hidalgo de Polanco, Calderon helped to create a new operatic form for the king, the zarzuela. These pieces are partially spoken and partially sung. Today, the zarzuela remains a popular dramatic form in Spain and many Spanish-speaking countries.

Autos Sacramentales

Autos sacramentales during the Golden Age of Spain could take many forms. Some told biblical stories, like mystery plays. Others recounted miracles or the lives of saints, like miracle plays. Most frequently, however, they contained allegorical figures similar to those found in morality plays. In any case, the finest dramatists available, including both Lope and Calderon, were chosen to write the plays.

Though older plays were sometimes revived, from 1647 to 1681 all of the autos sacramentales performed in Madrid were new works commissioned especially from Calderon. In fact, when Calderon died in 1681, he was writing one of the auto sacramentales for that year's Corpus Christi celebration. Of Calderon's many plays of this type, the most famous is The Great Theatre of the World. The play portrays God as a theatre director who casts individuals as King, Female Beauty, Rich Man, Poor Man, Worker, Discretion, and Unborn Child. God asks each to act his or her part as well as possible then sends them each to a final judgment.

The actors for these plays processed through the streets on two-story wagons called carros. There were usually two carros for each play, and actors would descend onto an acting area for the performance. The acting areas were originally also on wagons, though they were later replaced by fixed stages in various parts of the city. In addition to performing the autos sacramentales, actors danced and sometimes put on short farces, much to the dismay of religious conservatives. In 1765, the government officially banned the plays.

New World Performance

As Spain's culture spread throughout its empire, Spanish theatre spread as well. In the Americas, Spanish theatre blended together with indigenous theatrical practices. In Guatemala, the theatrical dance known as the Rabinal Achi became associated with the Feast of Saint Paul on January 25. Also known as The Dance of the Trumpets, it is still performed annually in the town of Rabinal on that day. The dialogue of the play is in Mayan, and the story recounts events prior to the conquest by Spain. Still, the fact that it came to be associated with a Christian religious holiday shows that there were attempts to bring together Spanish and indigenous cultures.

Given that indigenous Americans often already had theatrical traditions, many Christian missionaries found theatre to be an effective tool for evangelization. Beginning in the 1530s, the Spanish began performing their own plays in the Americas. These performances were usually religious in nature and frequently occurred on feasts such as Corpus Christi, as they did in Spain. The first great Spanish playwright to be born in the Americas was Juana Ines de la Cruz, a highly educated nun generally known as Sor Juana. Born in present-day Mexico, Sor Juana wrote both secular and religious plays and is considered the founder of Latin American drama.

The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Mexican woman of Spanish descent, Sor Juana learned to read and write Spanish at an early age. By the time she was a teenager, she knew Latin and Greek as well. She joined the court of the viceroy of New Spain, but in spite of receiving numerous marriage proposals there, she chose instead to enter a convent. Finding the rules in that convent did not agree with her, Sor Juana left after a few months, but in 1669 she entered another convent run by the Order of St. Jerome, where she remained until her death. It was there that she composed her best-known works, including most of her plays.

Sor Juana wrote (or at least collaborated on) some secular plays, but more critics have been drawn to her autos sacramentales. The most famous of her religious plays is The Divine Narcissus, a complex allegory of faith. The play contains a short introductory piece called a loa. In her loa to The Divine Narcissus, Sor Juana portrays the conquest of the New World in allegorical terms. Occident and America are shown worshipping the God of Seeds, but are overcome by Religion and Zeal. Though Zeal wishes to slay America, Religion promises to convert the pagans by means of the play that follows.

The loa to The Divine Narcissus shows just how ambitious a writer Sor Juana was. Unfortunately, her plays were mostly forgotten before the twentieth-century poet Octavio Paz brought renewed attention to Sor Juana's work. Today, however, historians credit Sor Juana with laying the foundations of all Latin American drama that was to come. The roots of drama in the Americas extend back much further than the nineteenth-century, as past historians might have us believe. Instead, the Golden Age of Spain quite clearly extended to the Western Hemisphere, having a lasting impact on the other side of the globe.

Notes on Medieval Drama

Liturgical Drama

Though early Christians opposed the theatre, their rituals were themselves dramatic. At the heart of Christian religious services was in fact a re-enactment of the Last Supper, the final meal of Jesus Christ before his crucifixion and death. This sacred meal would later become very important to the history of Western drama, but it was actually the celebration of Easter--the feast commemorating Christ's resurrection--that gave rise to the first recorded Christian liturgical dramas.

The earliest liturgical dramas trace their ancestry at least to the early tenth century, when the monks in the Swiss monastery of St. Gall sang a trope beginning with the line "Quem quaeritis?" or "Whom do you seek?" It is clear that the so-called Quem Quaeritis Trope soon had a distinctly theatrical staging. Instructions from a tenth-century bishop, Ethelwold of Winchester, called for one singer impersonating an angel to ask, "Whom do you seek in the sepulcher, O Christian woman?" Then, three singers representing the three women at the tomb were to respond, "Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, O heavenly one." The angel was then to sing, "He is not here; He is arisen, as He foretold. Go and announce that he is risen from the dead."

From these humble beginnings arose elaborate plays performed inside churches. For these performances, we have records of costumes, sets, and impressive special effects, including an Ascension play in which an actor playing Christ was hoisted up into wool clouds inside the church. Other plays portrayed processions of prophets, shepherds coming to see the infant Christ, and the visitation of the three magi. The action of the plays frequently began on raised platforms called mansions erected inside the church. Stage directions sometimes called for actors to come down from the mansions and perform on a common playing area known as the platea, which was on the same level as the audience.

These early plays were in Latin, but in the twelfth century plays in the local vernacular began to appear. One, The Play of Adam, which was performed in northern France, was written mostly in Norman French, though it has substantial passages in Latin. From the stage directions, it seems clear the play was performed in front of a church, with characters occasionally exiting into the church. In later centuries, many plays took place away from churches entirely and were performed not by churchmen but by lay actors speaking (and only occasionally singing) in the vernacular.

Corpus Christi Plays

In 1208, a canoness named Juliana of Liege (in present-day Belgium) reported having a mystical vision of Christ urging her to work for a new feast for the church. The vision told her there must be a specific feast to celebrate Christ's bodily presence in the Eucharist, the sacrament served during the ritual re-enactment of the Last Supper. Juliana claimed to have had the vision over and over again for years before she finally related it to her confessor. The confessor told the bishop, who proclaimed in Liege a Feast of Corpus Christi, Latin for "Body of Christ." After a former Archdeacon of Liege became Pope Urban IV in 1264, the feast spread across Europe.

Traditionally, people celebrated Corpus Christi by taking a consecrated wafer, believed to be the Body of Christ, out of the church and parading it through the streets of the town. In some places, the Feast of Corpus Christi came to be associated with a procession of plays through the streets. These plays told the history of the entire world, as Christians understood it, from the Fall of Lucifer, to the Last Judgment. They focused, however, on how through Christ humanity came to be saved. Each play could be associated with a different guild or craft, known as a mystery, hence the plays are often called mystery plays.

Cycles of mystery plays were performed throughout Europe, but they were particularly popular in England. Each guild generally sponsored a different play and produced it every year or few years. A guild might take charge of a particular play for practical reasons, for instance the shipwrights' guild performing the play of Noah's Ark. There was generally a symbolic reason for the guild to perform a play as well. In York, the Pinners' Guild, which made nails, performed the Crucifixion.

The guilds built elaborate carts that paraded through the streets, stopping periodically to perform the plays. In some cases, the performance sites were close enough together that the audience would be able to vaguely hear the previous play at the next site and the next play at the previous site. This could have emphasized the idea that each scene was a part of a larger narrative involving the cosmic history of humanity's redemption. Because there were so many plays, performances of an entire cycle lasted from one to three days, and sometimes even longer. Performances began at dawn and ended at sundown.

After the Protestant Reformation, the government in England banned the performance of these plays, though some cities managed to hold onto the tradition well into the reign of Elizabeth I. Scripts for four nearly complete cycles survive in English. They are the cycles for York, Wakefield, Chester, and a city designated in the script as "N-town." There are many theories about where "N-town" might have been, or whether that name was just a placeholder, and the name of any city could have been used in the script depending on where the plays were performed.

Eight of the plays in the York cycle are written in an alliterative verse identified with an anonymous playwright scholars have dubbed the York Realist. These plays all deal with the Passion of Christ, from the conspiracy to arrest Jesus to his body's burial. Written sometime in the fifteenth century, the plays of the York Realist achieve an emotional intensity rarely exceeded in medieval drama. The characters in these plays maintain a believable psychology even as they sometimes address the audience directly.

Even more famous is a playwright known as the Wakefield Master, who wrote in an equally distinctive verse form. The Wakefield Master wrote the better part of at least six plays, including not one but two plays about shepherds visiting the infant Christ. The First Shepherd's Play shows three petty shepherds who are so foolish they argue with each other over imaginary sheep. After an angel appears to them, however, they become humbled. They travel to Bethlehem while singing a song and then offer simple gifts to the newborn child.

The Second Shepherd's Play is an even more famous depiction of the same events. The shepherds have the same names as in the former play, but it is unclear if the plays were performed together or alternated on different years. The Second Shepherd's Play is notable for a folk-tale plot that precedes the main action. In the folk-tale plot, a thief named Mak steals a sheep and takes it home to his wife. The wife pretends the sheep is a newborn child to whom she has just given birth, but the shepherds see through the ruse and punish Mak, tossing him in a blanket. An angel then appears, and the shepherds visit a real infant who in Christian theology is known as "the Lamb of God."

As can be seen, mystery plays went beyond the depiction of events as described in the Bible. While they sometimes adhered closely to biblical narratives, they also added in accounts from other sources, such as folk traditions, Apocryphal Gospels, and medieval poems. Often they contained songs, the most famous of these coming from The Shearmen and Tailors' Play. This piece comes from a cycle of mystery plays (only two of which have survived) that were performed in Coventry in the fifteenth century. It ends with three songs, one of which is still frequently sung at Christmastime. The song, generally known as "The Coventry Carol," laments the innocent children slaughtered by King Herod.

Herod was in fact one of the great characters of the medieval stage. A famous stage direction in The Shearmen and Tailors' Play reads: "Here Erode ragis in the pagond and in the strete also." This seems to indicate that upon occasion the action of plays spilled over from the pageant wagons and into the audience. The passions of Herod, who would call out things like, "I stampe! I stare! I loke all abowtt!" were remembered well beyond the middle ages. Shakespeare's Hamlet recalls such antics when he remarks that overacting "out-herods Herod."

European Passion Plays

Biblical cycle plays telling multiple stories but focusing on the life and death of Christ were performed on the European continent as well as in England. Since these plays usually focused on the "Passion" of Christ (Christ's betrayal, trial, and execution) they are often referred to as passion plays. The earliest surviving play depicting the crucifixion of Christ is a twelve-scene play from Montecassino, Italy that dates from the middle of the twelfth century. The thirteenth-century manuscript known as the Carmina Burana, which was discovered in the monastery of Benediktbeuern in German, also contains two passion plays. Though the first passion plays appear to have been performed inside churches, later plays were staged outside in public places.

Rather than having guilds stage cycle plays, many places in Europe formed special associations to produce their annual or semi-annual passion plays. For instance, in the town of Lucerne in Switzerland the Confederation of the Crown of Thorns staged a passion play that took place over two twelve-hour performances. That play took place in the town square. On one side of the square was a mansion representing Paradise, and at its base was the Garden of Eden. In a corner on the other side of the square was a mansion representing the mouth of Hell.

Such Hell Mouths were typical of medieval plays. They were literal demonic mouths through which demons would emerge to drag characters into Hell. Smoke billowed out of the mouth, and medieval technicians staged small explosions there, which unfortunately went wrong upon occasion, causing injuries. Opposite the Hell Mouth was typically Paradise, which contemporary reports considered the grandest of all the mansions. One representation of Paradise in Florence had ten rotating wheels bedecked with copper lanterns to represent stars.

In France, the town of Valenciennes staged a passion play with more than 100 roles, though the production did utilize some doubling. Actors in the Valenciennes passion play had to take an oath that they would follow through with their duties and appear in the performance. Actors were fined for breaking rules or missing performances. In Valenciennes, final rehearsals took place in the morning, and scenes from the play were performed in the afternoon. The play took a full 25 days to perform the entire cycle.

Gradually, these massive performances faded, but fortunately for us, some of them were recorded for us visually. In 1577, the painter Hubert Cailleau created a color illustration of the Valenciennes passion play, which he had designed thirty years earlier. The illustration shows only a few of the mansions, which might have numbered as many as 70. However, it is likely some mansions were refitted for multiple uses. In Lucerne, for instance, 32 mansions provided about 70 locales. For all of the limitations of Cailleau's illustration, it is one of the best depictions we have of medieval passion plays.

Miracle Plays

Not all medieval plays focused on the life of Christ. Also popular were miracle plays, which told the stories of miraculous events and often focused on the life of a saint. One of the best depictions of a miracle play is an illustration done by the 15th-century artist Jean Fouquet of a play depicting the martyrdom of St. Appollonia. The illustration shows a series of mansions, including a Hell Mouth. Overseeing the proceedings is a man with a book and a staff, who appears to be directing the action.

Many of these plays focused on the life of the Virgin Mary or on St. Nicholas. Miracle plays were particularly popular in England, but Henry VIII banned them in the 16th century, and few of them survive. One of these, The Conversion of St. Paul is a relatively short piece probably performed in conjunction with the feast day commemorating the apostle's conversion. Another English miracle play, The Play of the Sacrament, does not tell the story of any particular saint, but rather relates an anti-Semitic folktale about a host miraculously surviving torture from non-believers.

The longest and most famous of the English miracle plays is Mary Magdalene. This two-part play begins with Biblical accounts of Mary Magdalene, as they were interpreted during the middle ages, conflating several different women into a single character. The second half of the play continues the story of Mary, using legends about her converting the King and Queen of Marculle. The play also utilizes characters such as "World," "Flesh," "Devil," and allegorical figures of the Seven Deadly Sins. Because of this, Mary Magdalene also crosses over into another genre of medieval theatre, the morality play.

Morality Plays

Morality plays were particularly popular in the later middle ages. They portrayed individuals dealing with the temptations of life and relied heavily on allegorical figures. The most famous morality play is the anonymous Everyman, which also exists in a Dutch version called Elckerlijc, though it is unclear which version came first. In the play, God sends Death to the titular character. Everyman must account for his life, but all of his boon companions, such as Fellowship, Kindred, and Worldly Goods, abandon him. Ultimately, only a character known as Good Deeds will accompany him as he comes before God.

Another morality play, Mankind, also uses a generalized protagonist and allegorical figures. Unlike the somber Everyman, however, it uses outrageous scatological humor to keep the audience interested. During the play, actors portraying various vices ask the audience to give money if they want to see the devil Titivillus, a demon they promise will be highly entertaining. After the audience pays up, Titivillus makes Mankind's life miserable and convinces him to engage in a life of sin. Though Mankind ultimately accepts Mercy and is saved, the play reminds the audience that they were complicit in bringing about Mankind's sufferings.

While there is little evidence about how these plays were performed, the manuscript for the morality play The Castle of Perseverance contains numerous stage directions and even a drawing of the setup for the stage. From the drawing, it appears that the play took place in the round with five mansions around the perimeter. In the center of the action was a castle in which the character of Mankind took refuge from enemies including World, Flesh, and the Devil. When Mankind died, a character named Soul emerged from under his bed. Like other morality plays, The Castle of Perseverance ends with the judgment of the protagonist and a warning for the audience.

Farces and Interludes

Not all medieval plays in Europe were religious in nature. There was also a strong secular tradition of theatre at markets and fairs as well as before the courts of nobles and royalty. The anonymous 13th-century play The Boy and the Blind Man is the oldest surviving farce from the middle ages. It uses only two characters and could be performed practically anywhere. The play's depiction of a boy robbing and beating an old blind man might not sound very funny to us, but it seems to have entertained crowds well enough to convince them to give donations to the performers.

French farce seems to have directly influenced the English playwright John Heywood. Heywood wrote numerous court performances for Henry VIII. His most famous farce is Johan Johan the Husband, Tyb his Wife, and Sir Johan, the Priest, which also supplies the cast list in its title. The play makes fun of all of the characters, but especially the cuckolded husband whose wife is having an affair with the local priest. Such anti-clericism was typical of medieval humor, though the Protestant Reformation no doubt made it more politically desirable.

Entertainments like Heywood's were sometimes performed between courses of a feast, which might be the reason they came to be called interludes. Other interludes could be entirely mimed. They might be allegorical, like morality plays, but instead deal with secular topics. One Heywood interlude, The Play of the Weather, portrays several people asking Jupiter for different types of weather. Another play, The Four P's, depicts individuals of different professions. Interludes appear to have been common in courts throughout Europe during the medieval period.

Outside in the town square regular people were more likely to see quick farces like The Boy and the Blindman or folk plays depicting popular heroes like St. George or Robin Hood. The texts of these plays tend to be quite short, but they likely contained music, dancing, and mimed action. Some entertainments, such as those performed by costumed mummers were entirely mimed. Mummers disguised themselves as animals, wild men, or fantastic beasts. In addition to dancing, they sometimes played gambling games with the host of a feast, usually letting the host win.

Similar mimed performances were also given during triumphal processions. Performers dressed as allegorical figures, for instance, might greet a monarch entering a city. These performers sometimes created a living picture known as a tableau vivant.

The Medieval Inheritance

Many medieval traditions, including mummers, folk plays, and tableau vivants, continue until this day. Others, such as the English mystery cycles, have been revived in later centuries as an expression of historical interest and civic pride. Medieval plays influenced the Renaissance dramas of the golden age of theatre that was to come. Later playwrights, including Strindberg, have also looked to medieval drama for inspiration. While the middle ages seem remote in many respects, in other ways they are still with us.

One example of the dual nature of the medieval inheritance is the passion play performed in the German town of Oberammergau. Passion plays were already an old-fashioned throwback when from 1632 to 1633 the bubonic plague struck the town of Oberammergau. Residents vowed that if God spared them, they would for the rest of time produce a play depicting the life and death of Christ. In 1634, the town produced the play for the first time. Though originally Oberammergau put on the play every year, the town later shifted to producing the play once every 10 years.

Today, the people of Oberammergau still produce a passion play once every decade. The huge undertaking now involves more than 2,000 performers, musicians, and stagehands. About half a million people come from all over the world to witness the event. The play is now performed in a specially built outdoor theatre from May to October in years ending with zero. Each performance lasts about seven hours and includes a meal break.

While Oberammergau has the longest tradition of performing a passion play, many other communities have revived this medieval form for the modern era. Frequently, they have adapted it drastically for modern tastes and sensibilities. The New Jerusalem Theatre in Brejo da Madre de Deus in Brazil hosts an annual passion play in what is probably the largest outdoor theatrical space in the world. Since 1968, Eureka Springs, Arkansas has played host to one of the largest annual passion plays in the United States, which takes place in a 4,000-seat amphitheatre. The Mormon Miracle Pageant in Manti, Utah includes a non-biblical episode about Christ appearing to Native Americans that appears in The Book of Mormon.

The popularity of biblical movie epics from the films of Cecil B. DeMille to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ also owe a great deal to the medieval inheritance. Critics have attacked all of these productions for perpetuating negative traditions of the middle ages, including anti-Semitism. Supporters of these plays argue they are inspired by genuine religious conviction, that they teach important lessons, that they build civic pride, and that they help generate money for the local economy. All of these motivations are shared with the original guilds, confraternities, and professional acting troupes that performed drama in the middle ages. Also, some medieval critics leveled similar charges that passion plays created mischief and perpetuated erroneous doctrines. In more ways than one, the middle ages are closer to us than we might think.