THE SAINT'S PLAY IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Del Villar, Mary, 1917- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 10/10/2021 05:55:34 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/287462 70-15,517 DEL VILLAR, Mary Harmon, 1917- THE SAINT'S PLAY IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. University of Arizona, Ph.D., 19 70 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE SAINT'S PLAY IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND by Maryrdel Villar A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 7 0 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA. GRADUATE COLLEGE I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Mary del Villar entitled The Saint's Play in Medieval England be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy q i t-A /O Dissertation Director V Date After inspection of the final copy of the dissertation, the following members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and rec©mmen<L<bts acceptance:*" , , O.UTiiX. £i nan tb**«r* **1-1 a rt -i #1 O •* q' t Is""'approval ^itS acceptance is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense of this dissertation at the final oral examination. The inclusion of this sheet bound into the library copy of the dissertation is evidence of satisfactory performance at the final examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED PREFACE Thanks are due to the faculty members of The University of Arizona who' guided this study to its comple­ tion and offered many useful criticisms. X am especially indebted to Professor Richard Hosley, who suggested the subject of the saint's play and assisted me both in research and in writing with scholarly acumen and unfailing good humor. Professor James G. McManaway has my sincere thanks for making available to me the mine of information which he has at his command. The University of Arizona Library and its librarians have helpfully accommodated my many requests for out-of- the-way books. I also wish to thank the Columbia University Libraries for opening their collections to me. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT vi I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. LATIN SAINT'S DRAMA 15 III. VERNACULAR SAINT'S DRAMA ON THE CONTINENT 35 1. Conventions and Staging 38 2. Dramatized Miracles 46 3. Dramatized Saint's Lives 56 IV. THE SAINT'S DRAMA IN ENGLAND 86 V. THE DIGBY CONVERSION OF SAINT PAUL 114 VI. THE DIGBY MARY MAGDALENE 149 1. Mary Magdalene in Scripture and Legend 151 2. Mary Magdalene in Medieval Drama . 161 3. The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene . 175 VII. THE CROXTON PLAY OF THE SACRAMENT 203 VIII. TWO MIRACLES OF THE VIRGIN: DUX MORAUD AND THE PRIDE OF LIFE 233 1. Dux Moraud 236 2. The Pride of Life 245 IX. THE CORNISH LIFE OF SAINT MERIASEK 259 X. SAINT'S-PLAY ELEMENTS IN THE SCRIPTURAL CYCLES 302 1. Plays on the Early Life of the Virgin 303 2. Assumption Plays 313 3. Themes from Legend 327 4. The Veronica Play in the Cornish Ordinalia 332 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS—Continued Page XI. RENAISSANCE PLAYS ABOUT SAINTS 336 1. Saints in Moral Interludes 342 2. The Neo-Latin Saint's Play 353 3. Seventeenth-Century English Plays About Saints 366 XII. INFLUENCES OF THE SAINT'S PLAY ON ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA 380 XIII. CONCLUSIONS 402 LIST OF WORKS CITED 406 ABSTRACT Plays about saints and their miracles were acted the length and breadth of England for more than four hundred years. The first recorded performance of a saint's play in England was in the late eleventh century; by the thirteenth century such plays were a regular feature of London life. The saint's play is thus an older dramatic genre than the scriptural cycle and must have supplied conventions for the writers of the cycles. Because few English saint's plays have survived the Reformation and the ravages of time, the genre has not been given its rightful place as a part of the vigorous native dramatic tradition that helped to prepare the way for the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The extant texts, which are mostly from the fifteenth century, have been given little space in treatments of the English medieval drama. Those who have written about them for the most part have had little familiarity with the genre, its traditions, or its purposes. To evaluate the English plays, it is necessary to investigate the saint's plays that were written and per­ formed in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. In this study continental plays are used to provide a background for discussions of the extant English texts: The Conversion of vi vii Saint Paul, Mary Magdalene. The Play of the Sacrament, and the Cornish Life of Saint Meriasek. In addition, two fragmentary plays, Dux Moraud and The Pride of Life, are discussed as types of dramatized miracles of the Virgin. The scriptural cycles are treated only in so far as they contain elements associated with the saint's drama, such as plays on the Assumption of the Virgin, which may originally have been independent plays. Treatment of the plays includes consideration of sources, continental parallels, structure, conventions, and staging. The medieval English saint's play was destroyed by the Reformation, but some saints continued to appear in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays both in English and Latin. Among them are Nicholas Grimald's Archipropheta, George Buchanan's Baptistes. The Virgin Martyr by Dekker and Massinger, and Dryden's Tyrannic Love. While the saint's play can be said to have lived through the Reforma­ tion, the genre survived more significantly in the motifs and conventions which it bequeathed to the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. I INTRODUCTION Plays about saints—their lives, martyrdoms, and miracles—flourished in England for more than three centuries side-by-side with the Corpus Christi cycles. While the great scriptural cycles dramatize man's fall and man's salvation and extend in time from Creation to Dooms­ day, the saint's drama deals with but a segment of that vast spiritual spectrum—the deeds of heroes and heroines of the Church who carried the message of Christ throughout the world and often died for it. The dramatized stories of a number of saints might appropriately have been included in the Corpus Christi cycles between the Resurrection and Doomsday. The fact that they were not, even in France where performances of religious drama occasionally ran as long as forty days, suggests that the Middle Ages viewed the saint's play as a separate genre, with its own decorum. One significant difference between the saint's play and the other religious drama is that, while the Corpus Christi plays of England and the Passion plays of the Continent dramatized scriptural events (always with the admission of some apocryphal material), the saint's play is based upon secular history and legend, and the proportions 1 2 of these sources usually vary in accordance with the time when the saint in question lived. Plays on saints of the later Middle Ages, like St. Thomas a Becket, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas, contain a fair amount of documented history; those on St. George, St. Catherine, and St. Eustace are legendary, romantic, and archetypal. The saint's play also differs from the scriptural drama in that it offers greater opportunities for realism and a far wider range of character-types. While it is true that many saint's legends, and therefore saint's plays, succumb to the chivalric-courtly mystique and insist upon ennobling the pious protagonist and all his associates, plays that dramatize legends of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary or by other saints frequently dramatize the sins and sufferings of bourgeois characters in a realistic milieu. The importance of the saint's play in England as an influence upon Renaissance drama has been recognized by scholarship since Manly1s seminal but not very extended study of the 1920s.^ Manly believed that saint's plays were more important for the development of the drama in England than the scriptural cycles or the moralities because they introduced elements of romance, realistic 1. John M. Manly, "The Miracle Play in Medieval England," Transactions of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, n.s. 7 (1927 ):133-53. 3 treatment, and more unified subject matter. Recent scholarship on Shakespeare and the Elizabethans has taken note of Manlyrs suggestion and given the saint's play its place, along with Terence and Seneca, the cycle-play and the morality, as a genre that contributed a great deal to later drama, especially in the area of the wonderful and the romantic.