Music in Mediaeval Drama

Abstract

Music in mediaeval drama is, to some extent, a ghost subject. I hope in the course of this paper to enable you to hear nearly all the surviving music from the vernacular drama of late mediaeval England—from the cycles of religious plays known variously as the Miracle Plays, the Mystery Cycles, the Corpus Christi plays. My chief endeavour will be to build up a picture of a lost musical world. But—and this is why it must be described as a ‘ghost subject’—the actual musical remains are tantalizingly small: two English songs in the ‘true-Coventry’ plays; some Latin polyphony in the York cycle; a snatch of plainsong in the Chester cycle. The paucity also of stage-directions about music in some plays (especially of the Towneley cycle) is much to be regretted. But as there are over thirty clear directions in the Chester cycle and the same number in the Hegge plays, we do not work entirely in the dark.

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