Liturgical Drama: Development of Medieval Liturgical Drama

During the Middle Ages, the church was omnipresent; it is not surprising, therefore, that medieval drama was mostly religious. Moreover, much of the drama of this period was actually presented in the sanctuaries of churches and cathedrals. How could this be? How could the church, which had attacked theater so vehemently during the late Roman empire and the early Middle Ages, become the instrument of its rebirth?

There are several possible explanations for the development of church, or liturgical, drama. Religious rites have theatrical elements, and the rituals of Roman Catholicism are no exception. Roman Catholic rituals had many elements that contained the seeds of the rebirth of theater. The mass and the hours, the vestments worn by the clergy, the church space, the musical accompaniment, and the annual symbolic events (such as the burial of the cross on Good Friday and its resurrection on Waster Sunday) are all inherently theatrical.

Church drama seems to have developed along with changes in liturgical music. A popular form of early medieval music had two groups responding to each other in song, almost suggesting dramatic interaction. By the ninth century, extended musical passages, called tropes, had been added to services; later, lyrics were written for these passages. The mass was the most rigid of the numerous daily services for that reason, tropes were most often interpolated into other services, such as the Christmas and Easter. These tropes, which were sung or chanted in Latin to musical accompaniment, were in most cases performed in monasteries.