ABSTRACT
If we are to attempt to understand what drama meant to the mediaeval mind or to assess the approach adopted by men and women of the Middle Ages to dramatic entertainment, our first step must be to make several large adjustments in our own current attitudes to both the theatre and religion. Because so much of mediaeval drama was a product of Roman Catholicism, we have got to make allowance not only for the vast blanket of Protestant prejudice in which it has been smothered since the Reformation, but also for the more recent critical pre-conceptions which have their roots in anti-clericalism and scientific scepticism. One or more of these creeds has underlain almost every historical account of the origin and development of drama in the Middle Ages written during the past hundred and fifty years. It is hardly surprising therefore that to the student of today the words ‘mediaeval drama’, if they mean anything at all, carry with them images of quaint pageant-wagons, of crude devils with black faces and fireworks exploding out of their bottoms and of little alliterative playlets suitable for Sunday School but irrelevant to either life or the theatre in the twentieth century: nor have teachers, whether in schools or Universities, helped to dispel these deeply contemptuous and ingrained notions by persistently treating mediaeval drama as if it were at best some primitive, gothic prologue to Shakespearean drama which only merits a place in a curriculum of English studies because it happens to provide some useful Middle English texts for analysis. Needless to say the Latin antecedents of these texts have been almost wholly ignored. The idea has thus taken root that a latin drama of genuinely religious origin grew up in the early Middle Ages, was banished from the church to the market-place, was translated into the vernacular, secularized and vulgarized with superstitious and idolatrous accretions until it died in the late Middle Ages of its own obesity. The Penguin Short History of English Drama supplies an admirable example of this thesis in the form it has taken at popular level.
