“PASSION PLAY 2010″

Origins of the Passion Play

The origins of the French Passion play are found, not in liturgical drama, but in the narrative Passion des jongleurs, a widely circulated compilation of a number of legends associated with the last week of Christ’s life, based on apocryphal material as well as the Gospels. The Passion du Palatinus borrowed much of this, and was in turn copied in subsequent plays. The genre was particularly successful after the Hundred Years War. Eustache Marcadé’s Passion d’Arras (25, 000 lines, c.1440) set the pattern for most of the major plays. He divided his text into four journées, devoted respectively to the Nativity and Childhood of Jesus, his Public Life, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection.

This action is framed by the allegorical Procès de Paradis, in which Miséricorde and Pitié plead with God the Father to save mankind. Marcadé’s most famous successors were Arnoul Gréban and Jehan Michel. Few completely original Passion plays were composed after 1450; the dramatists (fatistes) normally adapted pre-existing texts, though these adaptations sometimes amounted to complete rewritings.

It is thus possible to trace the genealogy of Passion plays. Although only one manuscript of most mystery plays was copied out, such copies circulated in a limited geographical area, and each province had its own Passion play tradition. Several versions of the Passion d’Auvergne were performed in Montferrand in 1452, 1477, and the early 16th c.; the Passion du Palatinus gave rise to several Burgundian plays, including the Passion de Semur (1488). The most influential tradition sprang from Gréban’s play, itself modelled on Eustache Marcadé’s.

A change in emphasis is noticeable as the plays grew longer. Whereas the 14th-c. texts are content to dramatize the story which is the basis of the Christian religion, the later plays seek to comment, interpret, sermonize, and moralize, as well as to provide entertainment, excitement, tension, and colour. The Passion plays had an educational function; they were books for the illiterate. Even so, like all mystery plays, they contained important realistic and comic elements. Read more