Performing the Passion: A study on the nature of medieval acting

At the core of medieval theatre are the actors and their audiences. My dissertation describes and analyzes medieval acting as it might have been understood in its own time. I focus on performances of Christ's Passion not only because the Passion narrative permeates medieval devotional and theatrical performance alike but also because the life of Christ was the ultimate paradigm towards which other stories and lives inevitably groped. I argue that participating in Christ's life as a performer or audience member was always both a religious and theatrical experience. Medieval performance---both devotional and theatrical---encouraged audience participation, and medieval spectators were highly engaged with the performances. The level of audience participation encouraged and enabled the socio-political critique of contemporaneous events through the restaging of sacred history. Devotional performance was not solely devotional, nor theatrical performance purely theatrical, and it is impossible to understand either without reference to the other. My answer to the primary question, "What did it mean to act in the Middle Ages?," relies on a religious practice known as imitatio, in which men and women reenacted the lives of saints and other holy figures. The practice of imitatio existed throughout Western Europe, and I believe that performances of vernacular Passion Plays owe a great deal to this religious form of mimesis.;Due to the lack of previous studies of this precise nature and to the wide swathe of material I needed to cover, I divided my dissertation into two halves. The first half analyzes the elements I believe provide the necessary background for an understanding of medieval vernacular performance, including Saint Francis of Assisi, the female solo-performer Elisabeth of Spalbeek (c.1246/7-1304), and Englishwoman Margery Kempe. In the second half, Chapter Four focuses on medieval theatrical audiences for Passion Plays and on the plays themselves, while Chapter Five evaluates the actors and stagecraft of the theatrical Passions and their connection to devotional performance. The final chapter glances at the post-medieval period with two early modern case studies: the devotional performer Maria Maddalena de Pazzi (1566-1607) and two of Shakespeare's history plays, 3 Henry VI and Richard II.