The Middle After the destruction of the theatres by the Christians, all knowledge of the classical drama or theatre practically dis appeared. An extensive and multiform drama arose without dependence on classical precedent, never in any nation attaining much literary value, but of interest to the student both as a most significant illustration of the life of long centuries and as a potent influence upon modern drama. The origins of this mediaeval drama are various. Games and sports offer their share of mimetic performances, tracing back appar ently as did the Dionysiac festival at Athens to early celebrations of spring and harvest; and the popular entertainers, the direct descendants of the Roman mimes, seem to have exercised an effect, not easily traceable, on comedy, especially on the farces and sottistes in France. The main stream of mediaeval drama, however, had its ori gin in the Church liturgy. The Church service contained many manifestly dramatic elements; and the goffices,D especially those for Easter and Christmas, were gradually expanded into little plays that grew into the mysteries, miracles and moralities of later times. The steps in this growth cannot be traced with chronological exactness, but the process was one of seculari zation, the removal of the play from the service, from the Church itself, and eventually from the hands of clerical actors, and the intrusion of the vernacular and its final triumph over the Latin of the Church service. The institution of the Festival of Corpus Christi (1264, confirmed 1311) gave new support to these plays, and during the 14th and 151h centuries their vogue under control of the guilds and other lay organ izations became enormous, in spite of the pro tests of the Church, which began to look askance at the realistic and spectacular treatment of the holy writ.
The earliest vernacular play is the Norman Adam written apparently in the 12th century; and the earliest examples of Miracles date in the 13th. The typical Miracle was a dramatic adaptation of a saint's life with the intercession of the Virgin on behalf of the suffering saint. In French drama, the miracles are to be distin guished from the Mysteries, which dealt with stories from the Bible and which ran to inor dinate length, the entire Bible history being treated in a cycle of short scenes. These cycles in France were huge conglomerates, that of the Acts of the Apostles extending to 62,00Q lines and occupying 40 days for its performance. In England no distinction was made between mira cle and mystery, miracle becoming the generic name, although few plays based on saints' lives occur. After the institution of the Corpus Christi celebration, miracles came into the hands of the town guilds, the cycle to be performed being divided into small plays and each assigned to a particular guild. Four great collections exist, the York plays (48 in number), Towneley (32), Chester (25) and Coventry (42), all dating in the 14th or early 15th century. Each follows the story from Creation to .Judgment Day. There were also other cycles and many separate plays, and the performance of plays by guilds extendecli•o nearly every town of im portance in England.
In Italy in place of miracles there were Seer. Rappresentaaioni, and in Spain and Germany the development from the liturgical to the full fledged miracle or mystery did not differ greatly from that in England or France. Only in France did the drama depart extensively from religions themes, both in the secular mysteries and also in farces of which is the best example. In spite of the sameness and artlessness of the religious drama, certain ele ments of development are manifest. A desire to bring the story home to illiterate audiences led to. both realistic and spectacular enforce ment; and the addition of episodes furnished a needed comic relief and gave opportunity for some inventiveness. Another tendency, not so clearly progressive, was didacticism which com bining with the fondness for allegory led to the Morality, a presentation of a moral lesson through personified abstractions. Apart from its allegory, however, the morality was an ad vance in requiring invention of plots and in centring the interest on a moral conflict.
The Renaissance.-- The mediaeval drama had reached a stage that held some promise of further development, when the revival of classi cal learning introduced entirely foreign ele4 meets and immensely hastened prog ress. In the conflict and amalgamation of these humanistic and mediaeval elements, modern drama had its origin. The mediaeval drama, mainly religious in theme, servile in its adherence to sources, ignorant of any distinc, tion between a narrative and a dramatic fable and blind to the absurdity on the stage of much which might be essential in a story, permitted the presentation of all kinds of action and de. lighted in discordant combinations of the comic and the tragic. Against such a drama, the humanists protested and opposed their knowl edge of the classics, the rules and proprieties of which they sought to impose on the theatre of their day. Their models, however, were not the Athenians, but Seneca in tragedy and Plautus and Terence in comedy; and their imitations lacked the authority of great masters as well as suitability to current theatrical con ditions. The classical influence proved power ful, not through direct imitations, but rather in modifications of medieval forms and methods, in widening the range of subjects, and most of all in encouraging innovation and experiment. The last of the 15th and the whole of the 16th centuries witnessed in the various nations of Europe this conflict between medievalism and humanism in the drama as in other fields of literature and life. Neo-Latin plays, vernacular imitations of Seneca and Plautus, miracles, moralities, interludes and farces, every variety of form, jostled together and led at last to rec ognized standards and great achievement. In Spain and England, especially, national dramas arose that carried on mediaeval traditions, though with much indebtedness to classical fecundation.