Medieval religious drama: angels, devils and the mouth of hell
From the Quem quaeritis to the French mystery plays and Brunelleschi's machines: how the Middle Ages staged the sacred, the miracle and the devil.
European theatre, which had vanished as a public institution with the end of the ancient world, was reborn in the Middle Ages inside churches. Its first seed is a short sung dialogue in the Easter liturgy, known from its opening words as the Quem quaeritis, whom do you seek: the angel asks the women who have come to the tomb whom they are looking for, and announces the resurrection. The Regularis Concordia, drawn up in England around 970, already describes how the monks were to perform it, with costumes and gestures.
From the liturgy to the square
In the following centuries these liturgical dramas were enriched with episodes and characters. In the twelfth century the Ludus Danielis, a musical drama on the story of the prophet Daniel, was composed at Beauvais, and in the same period the Jeu d'Adam was written in the vernacular in the Anglo-Norman world. Its stage directions require the demons to run among the audience and drag the damned towards hell, amid smoke and the noise of beaten pots.
Over time the performances moved out of the churches onto the parvis and into the squares, grew longer and passed in part into the hands of confraternities and city guilds. In Italy, from the thirteenth century, the Umbrian confraternities of the disciplinati developed the dramatic lauda, also linked to the poetry of Jacopone da Todi, from which a devotional theatre in the vernacular emerged.
Mysteries and cycles
In France the mystères spread, gigantic performances of sacred history. The Passion of Arnoul Gréban, composed around the middle of the fifteenth century, runs to tens of thousands of lines and required several days of performance. In England the cycles of York, Chester and Wakefield flourished, linked to the feast of Corpus Christi: each guild staged an episode on a wagon, from the creation of the world to the Last Judgement, and the wagons processed through the city.
The simultaneous stage showed paradise, earth and hell at the same time. Hell often took the form of a gigantic monster's mouth, the hellmouth, which opened and closed by means of mechanisms, belching fire and smoke. The devils, with animal masks, horns and tails, were among the audience's favourite characters, because they combined fear with comedy and farce.
The machines of Florence
In fifteenth-century Florence religious drama reached an extraordinary refinement. Feo Belcari wrote the Rappresentazione di Abramo e Isac in 1449, one of the best-known texts of the genre. For the feasts of the Annunciation and the Ascension, staged in several of the city's churches, stage machines were built that lowered angels from above amid lights and clouds. Giorgio Vasari credits Filippo Brunelleschi with designing one of these devices for the church of San Felice in Piazza.
A Russian bishop, Abraham of Suzdal, who visited Florence in 1439 at the time of the council, left an amazed description of these shows, with suspended angels, torches and revolving heavens. Religious drama thus prepared the stagecraft of the Renaissance and the Baroque, and with it the idea that theatre could make the supernatural visible, bringing heaven down to earth and opening the gates of hell before people's eyes.