Of Miracles, Mysteries and Moralities

Today (Christmas, 2024), I’m pretty sure, marks the 50th anniversary of my participating in my boyhood church’s annual Christmas pageant. It wasn’t my first public performance (which was this) but it’s always been important to me, as I eventually had the honor of playing a much larger role (Joseph) in the annual ritual. And I know that it wasn’t any earlier than this, as someone just shared a photo of the previous year’s pageant (1973) and I wasn’t yet in it.

As I mentioned the other day, I was accidentally raised Episcopalian. Ultimately that happenstance is a contributing factor to my subsequent lifelong immersion in the theatre. Most Protestant sects have a history of animadversion to the theatrical arts reaching back centuries. The Church of England (mother church of Episcopalianism) and the English Catholic Church that preceded it have had a much more cozy relationship with the performing arts, dating back to Medieval times. It’s in fact one of the many things about Henry’s church that the Puritans objected to.

In writing my hundreds of biographies of actors, one thing that I have noticed (and have had to restrain myself from crowing about most of the time) was the number of them who were Episcopalians — second only to Catholics and Jews in American theatrical culture, I believe, though I have no hard data. To this day, here in New York there’s an Episcopal Actors Guild, which turned 100 last year. There are many reasons for this, that I can think of. One is the dominance of Anglo actors in American theatre at least until the mid 20th century. Another is that New York has a different history from Puritan New England. Once the English seized the place in the late 17th century, it brought its official church with it (as opposed to the renegade denominations to the North). Coincidentally, Clement Clark Moore, author of “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, was a major figure in New York’s Episcopal Church, as I wrote here.

And the other aspect, again, that long relationship, stretching back to the Middle Ages. As we wrote at some length inNo Applause, and have mentioned from time to time on this blog, the early Christian church banned theatre entirely as being a tool of Satan. But it didn’t take long for the priesthood to recognize the value of some kind of make-believe performance to communicate stories to their parishioners. The services were in Latin then (not conducted in vernacular languages until modern times), and most of the public were illiterate. So services began to be supplemented with dumb-show enactments of Biblical stories. In time dialogue came to be added.

For some reason, every thing connected with Medieval theatre seems to start with the letter M. We’ve already written about Mimes, Minstrels, Mummers, and Morris Dancers. Today, just a very brief intro to Miracles, Mysteries, and Morality Plays. For theatre folks, this will be a tedious return to Theatre 101, but those outside the silo many enjoy a brief outline of the phenomenon.

In effect, the theatre of western Europe, which had been born out of the Pagan rites associated with Dionysus, was REBORN out of the Catholic rites associated with Christianity. This has always been extremely interesting to me. It seems to indicate not so much an intention as an instinct. It is what people DO. Confronted with an audience (or a congregation if you prefer), the presenters feel a need to reward the onlookers with something worth looking at. It can be vestments and finery, and billowing incense smoke, and so forth. But it can also evolve into stories.

Services began to be embroidered and enhanced in this way as early as 500 A.D., mere decades after theatre had been outlawed. The vernacular tongue was employed in little vignettes conveying the Biblical stories of the Fall of Lucifer, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Isaac, the Life of Mary, the Miracle of Loaves and Fishes, the Passion and Resurrection, the Last Judgment and (very important in light of the present season) The Nativity. Craft Guilds were often entrusted with putting these shows on. From churches and cathedrals they moved to outdoor spaces as well, often moving from place to place on customized wagons that doubled as performance platforms. Certain holidays (Christmas, Easter, etc) and certain cities (Wakefield, York, Coventry) became associated with particular pageants. Stock characters like devils and clownish comedy roles emerged (Noah’s wife was frequently one of the latter). These proved foundational to similar stock characters right down to our own times. The so-called Miracle Play, once used sort of interchangeably with Mystery Play, is now used to refer strictly to the plays that dealt specifically with the lives and works of Saints. Very few scripts from these religious presentations have come down to us, just a handful. By the mid 16th century, the Mystery Plays were banned by the church — soon to be replaced by the secular professional theatre we associate with the Elizabethans.

A stepping stone toward the secular theatre was the slightly different phenomenon of the Morality Play (a retroactive branding — they weren’t called such at the time). Dating from the late Middle Ages to the early Tudor Era, these were allegories in which a single hero representing humanity (literally the Everyman of the eponymous 1510 play) encountered temptations and trials, sins and pitfalls, usually personified, and overcame them. John Bunyan’sThe Pilgrim’s Progress seems to me to be very much modeled on the structure and technique of these stories. They possess an epic structure rather than a dramatic one. They are more novelistic in form. Fiction writers and novelists have often drawn from this tradition — it’s very much baked into English literature. These types of plays were presented in courtyards, village squares, and the like. In time English theatres would move indoors, into taverns, and then dedicated playhouses.

And then of course came the Puritans, who banned it all over again It’s just a cyclical dance we do, I guess.