routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

46 Old and Middle English 600–1485
MEDIAEVAL DRAMA
He playeth Herod on a scaffold high
(Geoffrey Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale)
From classical Greek times, and in many other cultures, theatre has
maintained strong religious connections. The origins of English theatre
are religious too.
Literary representation was, as we have seen, in the hands of
monasteries as the guardians and propagators of the written word.
From Caedmon onwards, the local language appears in literature and
history, although Latin, the language of the English church, whose
base in Rome was accepted in England until the 1530s, was the language
of documentation. Even the source which contains the account of
Caedmon (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History) was written in Latin. King
Alfred encouraged the use of the vernacular in the late ninth century,
but he made it clear that this was very much second best, necessitated
by the deplorably low standards of Latin learning in his kingdom. The
growing use of English may also reflect the church’s constant concern
over several centuries to reach out to people in the vernacular, which
led to a wide number of translations of the Bible, or parts of it.
The earliest and simplest church drama was a similarly motivated
attempt to bring Bible stories to a wider audience, to make liturgical
stories more widely accessible. Initially, the scenes represented were
the miracles performed by Christ, or the ‘mysteries’ of the nativity and
the resurrection, Heaven and Hell. The genre of miracle and mystery
plays evolves during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the
representation of these scenes inside the church, and later outside.
The move to bring the mysteries outside the church is highly significant.
It opens up the performance to all the citizens of the growing cities and
allows the festivals at which they were presented to develop into full
holy-days, or holidays. The presentation of the plays became the civic
responsibility of the guilds, the associations of tradesmen. Each guild
would present its play, often on a mobile wagon which would then be
moved to various points around the city. Thus the audience, staying in