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Fifth Century
The remnants of classical theater, as performed in Rome, are suppressed on moral grounds by the late roman emperors, who have been converted to Christianity. As a result, there will be virtually no regular theatrical activity in Europe throughout the early Middle Ages.
Tenth and Eleventh Centuries
The first glimmerings of a rebirth of the theater occur, within the context of the church itself. Dramatic elements of the Christian liturgy, such as the sections of the Mass narrating Christ''s Last Supper, begin to be elaborated by the use of dialogue like antiphonal chanting and dramatic gestures. These brief dramatic scenes slowly grow into devotional playlets, though they remain part of the liturgy.
Twelfth Century
By this time, some religious drama has moved outside the confines of the liturgy. Christmas and Passion plays, for example, are now performed outside the church building and are no longer part of the Mass. The play Adam, depicting the Creation and Fall of Man, is one of the best example of the early drama; written in Anglo-Norman French, it may have been performed in England and probably represents a forerunner of the cycle plays of later centuries.
1311
Pope Clement V sets aside the Thursday after Trinity Sunday as a holy day celebrating Christ''s institution of the Mass at the Last Supper. Known as Corpus Christi Day, it is to include a procession, out of which will later grow the processional productions of the cycle plays. Corpus Christi Day usually falls in June, when the weather is generally conductive to outdoor performances.
1318
Date of the earliest recorded Corpus Christi processions in England.
1378
By this date, the Corpus Christi cycle plays are being performed in York and probably elsewhere in England. The plays, produced by the various craft and merchant guilds of a town under the auspices of the church, depict events of Old and New Testament history from the Creation through the life of Christ and down to the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. In some towns, the plays are performed on wagons that move in procession from place to place; members of the audience could sit in one location and see all the plays in turn. In other towns, the pageant wagons seem to be stationary, with the audience moving from one location to the next. Texts of fur English pageant cycles still exist: the York cycle, containing forty-eight pageants; the Wakefield cycle, thirty-two pageants; the so-called N Town cycle (sometimes called the Ludus Conventriae), forty-three pageants; and the Chester pageants from other cycles.
However, the best known of all the extant pageants are the highly sophisticated plays from the Wakfield cycle attributed to the anonymous author, probably a cleric, known as the Wakefield Master. He was probably a highly educated cleric stationed in the vicinity of Wakefield, perhaps a friar of a nearby priory. The Second Shepherds'' Play is one of these.
1457
Recorded visit of Queen Margaret to Conventry, where she sees the cycle plays performed in procession. Within a few decades, however, local productions by guilds appear to be on the decline in most English towns. It is possible that professional or semiprofessional acting troupes may have begun taking the plays on tour from town to town instead.
1567
Queen Elizabeth I sees four pageant plays at Coventry; however, they are apparently performed at fixed locations by this time, with the audience moving from stage to stage for the different plays.
1576
The cycle plays have been in decline for about a century. They are now dealt a deathblow by the passage of laws forbidding the representation of Christ or God on stage as idolatrous. (The reformed English church is behind this repression.) As of this date, the Wakefield productions are halted. Throughout England, the master copies of the pageants, mostly in the possession of parish churches, are destroyed--hence the small number of manuscripts of the plays surviving into the twentieth century.
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