What Is Wrong With the Stage
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| Hersteller: | Forgotten Books (Poel, William) |
| Stand: | 2015-08-04 03:50:33 |
Produktbeschreibung
Excerpt from What Is Wrong With the Stage: Some Notes on the English Theatre From the Earliest Times to the Present Day Historians tell us that no drama of any kind existed in England before the Norman Conquest, and that for 250 years French Ecclesiastics composed and acted the first plays seen in this country. They were religious dramas written in Latin. In a Latin story of the thirteenth century we read that two friars, coming upon a large crowd in a field near a church, recognised that the spectacles such as they were wont to call "miracles" were being acted there, because the silence was broken only by "bursts of laughter and applause." Perhaps this demonstration of the crowd was an Anglo-Saxon way of telling Norman Ecclesiastics that the common folk were not able to regard Latin Christianised plays with feelings of devotion. The peasantry did not forget that the Norman Conquest brought England back into the Roman pale. So when the religious play was removed from the church into the meadow, the vernacular mingled in grotesque incongruity with the Latin, and scenes, both comic and in the vulgar tongue, were interpolated between the more solemn portions of the play. Nor could the clergy fail to realise that the people liked to hear dialogue spoken in a language which they themselves could understand. In fact the spectators were anxious to see even scriptural narratives embroidered by traits of character and incidents with which they were immediately familiar in their own towns. In 1311 the Council of Vienna, under Pope Clement V., decided that the feast of Corpus Christi should become an annual church festival in all the countries under its Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction. This meant a national holiday, and as the day of celebration was on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday it came at a time not far short of the longest day of the year. The English Trade Guilds, therefore, adopted the festival as an occasion for arranging, on a large scale, a religious pageant immediately connected with their own various trades; and appreciating the advantage of freeing Drama from the limitations of a Church Service, they linked together several religious stories, making one long, continuous, Biblical narrative, which afterwards became famous as the York, Chester, Wakefield, and Coventry Cycles. These Guild-Plays were not translations or even adaptations of French art; their most characteristic feature was a selection in arrangement, forming a collection or series, and this, more than any literary or dramatic merit in the individual plays themselves, was their contribution towards the evolution of drama. Then the Vatican, by a decree, thought to sanctify, more emphatically to a religious use, a popular taste for miracle plays. Englishmen, however, had never regarded these plays solely as religious ceremonies, but more as amusements, although neither in the church nor in the market place were the plays used as entertainments for which payment could be demanded. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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