Brianna Haskell's Individual Entry: Week #1

These first couple of weeks of investigating medieval church drama, I have come across a couple informative articles.  I really wanted to begin this project by investigating the structure of both the time period and the type of theater being done then, without focusing too much on specifics.  It was not until later in the week, coming up with our proposal that I really started to focus my research on the N-Town plays.  The first article of substance I read was a general overview of what medieval church theater comprised of, titled European Drama in the Middle Ages written in 2002 by S. Robinson.  Not having any previous knowledge of the dramatic structure of medieval church drama and very little information on the social structure of the time period, this article gave me a well-rounded, but brief overview of both of these.  In this article I was given an introduction to the social structure of the middle Ages.

The medieval time period consisted of a social and political structure surrounding the Catholic Church.  In the early Middle Ages the church was instrumental to the creation of theater. Theater before this period was traveling theater that was considered sinful and before the churches regulation of Theater it was not nearly as often performed as when it became church regulated.  After the first liturgical drama was written and performed there then came an explosion of plays, all based on Biblical stories, often the performances themselves controlled heavily by the church.  In these early times plays that were not approved by the church simply were not done.  The article then goes on to explain the transcendence of the Biblical stories throughout the middle ages into how they became less and less Church regulated.  There is a gradual shift in the freedom of theater that happens late into the medieval times.

I found the aspect of the overwhelming Church regulation of theater and how that began to dissolve throughout the years very interesting. In the article it is not mentioned exactly how that occurred so that is something I am hoping to find further information on.  Although we need to focus on a specific set of decades I think it may also be interesting to incorporate how theater in the Middle Ages went from Liturgical to Vernacular and how and why the Church began to lose control over the regulation of Theater.  This leads me to questions such as; did the church decide to weaken its regulation of theater? Or was theater and its artist at the time becoming so popular and powerful that theater became bigger than the church, and therefore no longer writing plays under its regulation?

As a group we came to the conclusion to focus on the N-Town Plays (liturgical drama) in comparison to other plays, possibly the York Town plays.  I’m unsure if the information I got from this article will tie in easily to our proposal but I’m hoping that there can be some comparisons and discoveries made for the ideas presented in that article that relate to our final presentation.  The main idea that I find most captivating being the gradual change of the dramatic structure of theater in the Middle Ages, going from Liturgical to Vernacular over a few centuries.

Robinson, Scott. European Drama in the Middle Ages. 2002.