Medieval Europe was the product of three branches of Indo-European culture colliding and blending. I’ve sometimes defined it as the time it took for the Barbarians who felled Rome to learn and surpass Rome’s greatness (at least in some ways). In France and England, a third branch was involved: the Celts, who were perhaps the first emigration of Indo-Europeans, settling along the Atlantic coast.
Medieval theater is distinguished by its blend of Latin and native folk traditions, returned in new form to the common people. We know how medieval theater ended, because it was the precursor to Shakespeare. But where did it start?
Both the Celts and the Germans had elements of their old religion that involved costumes and acting. They had a seasonal repertoire as religious holidays came with seasonal events. We don’t know much about it, since writing only came with the Latins. More about what we do know, next.
Greek and Roman theater also traced some seasonal religious holidays; the great plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus were written for festivals honoring Bacchus, god of wine (also called Dionysus). There were four Bacchanalia festivals that may have been held before the golden age of Athens, but they certainly were being held from the 500s BC, forward. Rome adopted them, too.
Some of the Bacchanalia did not involve public theater, but instead had secret rites and drinking festivals. But the Great Festival was the one we focus on, in which tragedies and comedies were staged. The Greek dramatic tradition was picked up and carried on by Rome, until finally Rome’s culture died off under pressure of Barbarian and Muslim invasions.
We see the same elements in all four cultures: seasonal religious festivals with secret rites that nobody wrote down for us modern Peeping Toms, and often with rites acted out dramatically, or with fully staged public drama. Northern Europe had no amphitheaters apart from the few Roman ones, but there’s no question that northern pagan plays were public, mostly repeated every year the same, but eventually with a tradition of changes.
In this series, we’ll start with the northern non-Christian drama customs, then go back to late Classical Latin plays and the role they played in shaping European intellectual life. Then we’ll move to the drama created by and for the church, and eventually to the publicly staged plays that blended elements from all of these branches and began developing ways to break the 4th wall and create special effects, things we’re still interested in today.