Excerpt from The Mediaeval Stage, Vol. 1

And explain the pre-existing conditions which., by the latter half of the sixtet century, made the great Shakespearean stage possible. The story is one of a sudden dissolution and a slow upbuilding. I have arranged the material in four Books. The First Book shows how the organization of the Gracco Roman theatre broke down before the onslaught of Christianity and the indifference of barbarism, and how the actors became wandering minstrels, merging with the gleemen of their Teutonic conquerors, entertaining all classes of mediaeval society with spectaada in which the dramatic element was of the slightest, and in the end, after long endurance, coming to a practical compromise with the hostility of the Church. In the Second Book I pass to spectacula of another type, which also had to struggle against ecclesiastical disfavour, and which also made their ultimate peace with all but the most austere forms of the dominant religion. These are the ludz' of the village feasts, bearing witness, not only to their origin in heathen ritual, but also, by their constant tendency to break out into primitive forms of drama, to the deep-rooted mimetic instinct of the folk. The Third Book is a study of the process by which the Church itself, through the introduction of dramatic elements into its liturgy, came to make its own appeal to this same mimetic instinct; and of that by which, from such beginnings, grew up the great popular religious drama of the miracle-plays, with its offshoots in the moralities and the dramatic pageants. The Fourth and final Book deals summarily with the transformation of the mediaeval stage, on the literary side under the influence of humanism, on the social and economic side by the emergence from amongst the ruins of minstrelsy of a new class of professional players, in whose hands the theatre was destined to recover a stable organization upon lines which had been departed from since the days of Tertullian.

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