Homo Ludens

Despite its ban in England, sacred drama remained a popular genre on the Catholic European mainland. The most famous of the European Passion plays in the Victorian period was the Oberammergau Passionsspiele, which had been staged every ten years since 1634. The large body of accounts, diaries, and newspaper reports written by members of British expeditions to Oberammergau tell us much about what it meant for sacred drama to be performed rather than simply read. Whilst many commentators critiqued the Passionsspiele in the terms that have become familiar throughout this study (including its Catholic ‘materialism’, and the betrayal of a sacred ‘Ideal’ by the flawed bodies of the all-too-human actors), others saw nothing less than a harbinger of renewal for the English stage if it could only foreground ‘genuine folk art’ in the way that Bavaria had done.

A Study in Repetition and Revival

This chapter offers close readings of a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century play-scripts about the murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, including works by Douglas Jerrold, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Alfred Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Tracing their performance over 100 years involves the exploration of changing attitudes to the performance of Christian worship and sacrifice on stage and, more broadly, the changing status of the Established Church itself. In the repetitions and variations of Becket’s narrative deployed over time, we can chart changes in the idea of Christian tragedy, renewed appreciation of the communal significance of religious ritual, especially in the revival of the classical chorus, and a growing sense that sacred drama was not just an aberration to be carefully policed and perhaps suppressed, but part of the living fabric of English national drama with a performative future as well as a past.

Ecce Homo, ‘Real Presence’, and the Word Made Flesh

Whilst censorship kept sacred drama off the English stage, other genres were not subject to the same legal regulation. Fiction, poetry, and visual art all meditated on the meaning of the sacred body and the ways in which its ongoing spiritual or metaphorical presence might be conjured from its material absence by members of a community of believers. The ways in which scriptural narrative and the liturgy sought to conjure up the dead, to resurrect the martyr, to reanimate the past, were urgent questions; for mid-Victorian writers, these same issues—which foregrounded the capacity of linguistic incantation to effect transformative change—were central not only to the inherited national faith that was under such pressure from nascent scientific methodologies and biblical criticism but also to the types of assent offered by the reader or spectator to the work of art.

‘[T]o see the work of God / Achieved for others’

Hone’s work exerted a profound influence over the nineteenth-century antiquarian and almanac traditions. Perhaps more importantly, his influence was also felt in the sacred dramatic literature of the period, with Lord Byron and Richard Carlile in particular expressing strong affinities with Hone’s radical politics and his appropriation of the plays as foundational to a demotic genealogy of blasphemy. Whilst Joanna Baillie, Richard Hengist Horne, Henry Hart Milman, and Digby Starkey also experimented with the form of the mysteries in the decades which followed Hone’s trials, they were compelled by law to position their work as closet drama, and even then their texts remained vulnerable to either prosecution for the common law offence of blasphemy or a denial of copyright protection from pirates as a consequence of their allegedly amoral tendencies. This chapter looks at a number of nineteenth-century sacred dramas to assess their contribution to political protest in their period.

The Art of the People

This chapter traces the rediscovery of the medieval mystery plays which had been suppressed at the Reformation. The texts were painstakingly recovered, edited, and published in the first half of the nineteenth century, by medieval scholars but also by radicals like William Hone who were keen to emphasize the political value of expanding the literary canon. At the start of the nineteenth century, then, vernacular devotional drama was largely unknown; by the 1850s, the genre had been accorded a place in an evolutionary design that privileged the achievements of Shakespeare, and by the early twentieth century, performance was finally countenanced, albeit under the watchful eye of the Lord Chamberlain. This is a narrative of recuperation but also of misunderstanding, as the mystery plays were also positioned as comic burlesque and farce in constructions of the literary canon which stressed the aesthetic and religious superiority of the Protestant present.

Censorship and Sacred Drama

The programme of entertainment on offer on the English public stage at the dawn of the nineteenth century was notably secular. The cumulative effect of Tudor injunctions, early modern legislation, and Protestant taste had been to banish the representation of scriptural subjects from the stage. This regulatory framework was underpinned by anti-theatrical anxieties and prejudices popularized and seemingly confirmed by the Reformation, which continued to be felt into the nineteenth century. Indeed, the enactment of the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 and the subsequent return of Catholicism to a position of public and artistic prominence at mid-century seems to have enhanced Victorian concern about the potentially deleterious effects of Catholic materialism and visual art. The composition and regulation of sacred drama serve as a test case, then, to probe and expose nineteenth-century anxieties about the form in which apprehensions of God could legitimately be expressed.

Introduction

Sacred theatrical performance has always attracted the strong scrutiny of the state. Consequently, one focus of this study is the relationship between sacred aesthetics and the law: what practices are considered in need of legal protection (or proscription), and how does that agenda change over time? But another is the way in which tradition (in this case, the long history of sacred drama in England) is constantly contested and revised, involving a profound interrogation of the extent to which the inheritances of the past shape the present or indeed the present predetermines our reading of the past. The Introduction alerts the reader to both these dynamics—the persistence of certain forms in the face of state censorship, and the ways in which that very narrative of continuity must be subject to critical scrutiny.

Conclusion

This chapter suggests that all the works discussed in this study—both canonical and minor, composed in verse or in prose—ask profound questions about the nature of the tragic mode and its relation to Christian thought. The nineteenth-century dramatic imagination is deeply political, staging memorable protests against the rhetoric of utilitarianism in political economy, Calvinism in religion, and the unjustifiable sacrifice of the one for the welfare of the many in ethics and anthropology. In contradistinction to the many studies which sideline dramatic writing in the long nineteenth century, this chapter concludes that dramatic form retains its value in this period as a significant vehicle for comment upon far-reaching questions of justice and ethics. Ultimately, theology raised too many important questions to be permanently excluded from the public stage—and the theatre was too valuable a forum to ignore religious experience.