PERDURANCE OF ANCIENT THEATRE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

It is commonly said that the theatrical genre perished after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and that it did not emerge again up until at least the eleventh century. This idea served to deepen the European Enlightenment's provided image of the Middle Ages as a period dominated by religion in which the values of the classical world had been completely lost. However, this is not a totally accurate image. Theatrical plays in the classical style would be performed until the end of the second century, but after this historical period most of them started to disappear from the stage and to be confined to the libraries of intellectuals and specialists, thus being substituted by rough comedies of rather vulgar or even obscene content, albeit much to the audience’s liking. This is the theatre that would decline and disappear for several reasons. Nevertheless, there was also another type of theatrical representations of an itinerant character bringing a diverse range of artists together which focused not so much on their literary quality as on everyday occurrences that would indeed survive despite the pressure exerted by the Church throughout the centuries. It is quite possible that the custom of attending such plays, the techniques used for developing the street performances and the actors who interpreted them collaborated to some extent, even if only indirectly, in the emergence of the first plays of a fundamentally religious character that appeared in the European Middle Ages, i.e., the liturgical dramas.