Medieval Contributions to Theatre by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The chapter title “The Age of Expiring Chivalry” in Calvin Thomas’ A History of German Literature could just as aptly be named “The Rise of Church Theatre.”
Thomas describes Easter plays in detail as Easter is the more important holiday in Europe than Christmas. There several kinds of plays presented by churches in open-air spaces that connect us with Europe’s past albeit in a fragmented form.
The plays orchestrated by the Church that Thomas describes include:
Easter plays – Pertains to the discovery of Jesus Christ’s body and his resurrection
Passion plays – Enactments of the trial, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ
Christmas plays – Depiction of the birth of Jesus
Shrovetide plays – Carnival plays before the fasting period of Lent before Easter
Thomas points out key elements about these productions that planners of small and large theatre acts should keep in mind:
*They were performed outside as open-air spectacles
*These dramas began as late-medieval performances and ended as spectacles by the fifteen century, “employing an army of actors” (Google page number 109, Book page number 3)
*The performances lasted several days
These plays functioned like the sculpture on the French Gothic cathedrals for teaching the illiterate Bible stories. Spectacles must have brought in necessary revenue as well, especially if they lasted over several days.
Thomas points out that Latin and German were used to narrate the plays, which does make them important for literature. Thomas complains that the play texts that survive are more akin to stage directions; they probably resemble a director’s copy of a screenplay.
Some of the stand-alone acts that we associate with circuses or as children’s entertainment have come down to us from church Easter theatre; these include clowns, any kind of horseplay, and scatological humor according to Thomas.
Many of these plays are still performed in Germany today for adults and children alike. These performances draw in tourists to contemporary Germany; they invite the spectator to hearken back to a medieval soul and assume the position as town baker, butcher or candlestick maker and play your role in society.
The Passion Play at Oberammergau outside Munich, Germany is still performed every seven years. There is a museum in town devoted to the history of the play.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup Like Chopsticks and Marrying France
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Exploring the Runes and the Edda with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Books about literature often provide a shortcut to learning about another culture. In the case of the German language, readers can find clues about how the cultures of Germany, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, Lichtenstein, and Luxembourg function.
As I read through the first half of A History of German Literature by Calvin Thomas on Google Books, I felt like I was reliving many of the experiences I had shared with my daughter when she was a grade school student at a Waldorf School.
This is not a farfetched claim when you consider that the founder of the Waldorf Schools, Rudolf Steiner, was Austrian and founded his first school in Stuttgart, Germany in 1919. Steiner’s philosophy focuses on the performing and visual arts as a means for teaching, which makes the mystical and medieval texts of the German language come alive.
Thomas relates in the very beginning of his book that the German runes are a form of paganism. He says that no extant literature exists which uses the runic alphabet. When my daughter and I made clay pebble tablets and inscribed runic symbols on them, which resemble Sumerian hatch marks, I told her, “People who could read runes were thought to be magic by everyone else. That’s why reading is still considered magic now.”
I believe that runes hid codes and showed my daughter how to set up codes similar to vignière ciphers to communicate with me. These codes may have been beyond her years, but they provided us with afternoon entertainment during long winter nights.
The entertainment for the Germanic peoples most probably came from what were eventually written down in the thirteen century Icelandic Edda that formed the corpus of the Norse myths. Thomas deals with these myths only briefly as he was focusing on indigenous literature, but these myths appear to be important to German speakers as well.
Thomas writes that it was only in the twelfth century that “gleeman’s or minstrel’s tales were written down.” The two most famous tales were The Niblung Lay and The Lay of Gudrun. What is interesting here is what Thomas shares about how storytellers memorize their tales for presentation.
Storytellers use “stereotypical phrases and prolixities which stamp the gleeman’s style.” (Google page 33, Book page 48). This creates flat characters, but allows the storyteller to focus on action and plot, perhaps accompanied with body movement.
Thomas further notes that “the gleeman’s art is discernable in this repetition, also in a marked fondness for fantastic adventures, hair-breadth escapes, cunning tricks and disguises, and in general for the wildly fabulous.” (Google page 48, Book page 63)
As I watched school performances where young children recited poetry each in turn, I understood why their teachers had them do this from reading Thomas’s A History of the German Language; Literature is based on the foundation of oral literature’s strong plot structure, especially when accompanied by music.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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