The fifteenth-century Mystery exhibits the culmination of the mediæval sacred drama. The word mystère,12 first appropriated to tableaux vivants, is applied to dramatic performances in the royal privilege which in 1402 conferred upon the association known as the Confrérie de la Passion the right of performing the plays of our Redemption. Before this date the Blessed Virgin and the infant Jesus had appeared upon the scene. The Mystery presents the course of sacred story, derived from the Old and the New Testaments, together with the lives of the saints from apostolic times to the days of St. Dominic and St. Louis; it even includes, in an extended sense, subjects from profane history—the siege of Orleans, the destruction of Troy—but such subjects are of rare occurrence during the fifteenth century.
For a hundred years, from 1450 onwards, an unbounded enthusiasm for the stage possessed the people, not of Paris merely, but of all France. The Confrères de la Passion, needing a larger repertoire, found in young ARNOUL GREBAN, bachelor in theology, an author whose vein was copious. His Passion, written about the middle of the fifteenth century, embraces the entire earthly life of Christ in its thirty-four thousand verses, which required one hundred and fifty performers and four crowded days for the delivery. Its presentation was an unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The work of Greban was rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumph when it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone either by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaboration with his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous Actes des Apôtres, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of five hundred performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, the happiness of the spectators was extended over no fewer than forty days. The Mystery of the Old Testament, selecting whatever was supposed to typify or foreshadow the coming of the Messiah, is only less vast, and is not less incoherent. Taken together, the Mysteries comprise over a million verses, and what remains is but a portion of what was written.
Though the literary value of the Mysteries is slight, except in occasional passages of natural feeling or just characterisation, their historical importance was great; they met a national demand—they constituted an animated and moving spectacle of universal interest. A certain unity they possessed in the fact that everything revolved around the central figure of Christ and the central theme of man's salvation; but such unity is only to be discovered in a broad and distant view. Near at hand the confusion seems great. Their loose construction and unwieldy length necessarily endangered their existence when a truer feeling for literary art was developed. The solemnity of their matter gave rise to a further danger; it demanded some relief, and that relief was secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside scenes of gravest import. Such comedy was occasionally not without grace—a passage of pastoral, a song, a naïve piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgar riot was more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris thought fit to interdict the performance of sacred dramas which had lost the sense of reverence and even of common propriety. They had scandalised serious Protestants; the Catholics declined to defend what was indefensible; the humanists and lovers of classical art in Renaissance days thought scorn of the rude mediæval drama. Though it died by violence, its existence could hardly have been prolonged for many years. But in the days of its popularity the performance of a mystery set a whole city in motion; carpenters, painters, costumiers, machinists were busy in preparation; priests, scholars, citizens rehearsed their parts; country folk crowded to every hostelry and place of lodging. On the day preceding the first morning of performance the personages, duly attired—Christians, Jews, Saracens, kings, knights, apostles, priests—defiled through the streets on their way to the cathedral to mass. The vast stage hard by the church presented, with primitive properties, from right to left, the succession of places—lake, mountain, manger, prison, banquet-chamber—in which the action should be imagined; and from one station to another the actors passed as the play proceeded. At one end of the stage rose heaven, where God sat throned; at the other, hell-mouth gaped, and the demons entered or emerged. Music aided the action; the drama was tragedy, comedy, opera, pantomime in one. The actors were amateurs from every class of society—clergy, scholars, tradesmen, mechanics, occasionally members of the noblesse. In Paris the Confraternity of the Passion had almost an exclusive right to present these sacred plays; in the provinces associations were formed to carry out the costly and elaborate performance. To the Confrères de la Passion—bourgeois folk and artisans—belonged the first theatre, and it was they who first presented plays at regular intervals. From the Hospital of the Trinity, originally a shelter for pilgrims, they migrated in 1539 to the Hôtel de Flandres, and thence in 1548 to the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Their famous place of performance passed in time into the hands of professional actors; but it was not until 1676 that the Confrérie ceased to exist.
Comedy, unlike the serious drama, suffered no breach of continuity during its long history. The jongleurs of the Middle Ages were the immediate descendants of the Roman mimes and histrions; their declamations, accompanied by gestures, at least tended towards the dramatic form. Classical comedy was never wholly forgotten in the schools; the liturgical drama and the sacred pieces developed from it had an indirect influence as encouraging dramatic feeling, and providing models which could be applied to other uses. The earliest surviving jeux are of Arras, the work of ADAM DE LA HALLE. In the Jeu d'Adam or de la Feuillée (c. 1262) satirical studies of real life mingle strangely with fairy fantasy; the poet himself, lamenting his griefs of wedlock, his father, his friends are humorously introduced; the fool and the physician play their laughable parts; and the three fay ladies, for whom the citizens have prepared a banquet under la feuillée, grant or refuse the wishes of the mortal folk in the traditional manner of enchantresses amiable or perverse. The Jeu de Robin et Marlon—first performed at Naples in 1283—is a pastoral comic opera, with music, song, and dance; the good Marion is loyal to her rustic lover, and puts his rival, her cavalier admirer, to shame. These were happy inventions happily executed; but they stand alone. It is not until we reach the fifteenth century that mediæval comedy, in various forms, attained its true evolution.
The Moralities, of which sixty-five survive, dating, almost all, from 1450 to 1550, differed from the Mysteries in the fact that their purpose was rather didactic than religious; as a rule they handled neither historical nor legendary matter; they freely employed allegorical personification after the fashion of the Roman de la Rose. The general type is well exemplified in Bien-Avisé, Mal-Avisé, a kind of dramatic Pilgrim's Progress, with two pilgrims—one who is instructed in the better way by all the personified powers which make for righteousness; the other finding his companions on the primrose path, and arriving at the everlasting bonfire. Certain Moralities attack a particular vice—gluttony or blasphemy, or the dishonouring of parents. From satirising the social vices of the time, the transition was easy to political satire or invective. In the sixteenth century both the partisans of the Reformation and the adherents to the traditional creed employed the Morality as a medium for ecclesiastical polemics. Sometimes treating of domestic manners and morals, it became a kind of bourgeois drama, presenting the conditions under which character is formed. Sometimes again it approached the farce: two lazy mendicants, one blind, the other lame, fear that they may suffer a cure and lose their trade through the efficacy of the relics of St. Martin; the halt, mounted on the other's back, directs his fellow in their flight; by ill luck they encounter the relic-bearers, and are restored in eye and limb; the recovered