288 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



religious plays to have sprung directly from the Church 

 ritual, 1 but if this be so, the ritual must have had an 

 earlier origin than we have any manuscript warrant for. 

 Due weight must of course be given to the fact that the 

 ritual actually remained practically constant in form for 

 four centuries, and therefore this ceremonial conservatism 

 may easily have existed for a long period before the 

 eleventh century. If this be the case, the Easter ritual, 

 as we know it, is only a survival of a primitive stage in 

 the life of the religious play ; it has continued to exist 

 side by side with its more highly developed offspring. 

 Against this view it may be remarked that there is no 

 sufficient evidence to show that all the eleventh-century 

 plays originally formed parts of the Church ritual. Very 

 possibly they may have been performed by monks and 

 cloister scholars. Latin plays with biblical and other 

 themes perhaps even those of Terence 2 appear to have 

 been acted in the cloisters before the religious play in 

 the Church had attained any considerable degree of 

 development. Yet the independent cloister -play 3 can 

 scarcely have been the source of the fully developed 

 passion-play ; for if it were, how shall we account for 

 the responses and hymns of the Church scenic ritual 



1 A, pp. 13, 14. In B, vol. i. pp. 6, 7, 55, Mone holds the origin of the 

 Easter-plays to have been the responses of the Church service, and of the 

 passion-plays the recitation of the gospel. 



2 Hros,\vitha's anti-Terentian plays certainly suggest this, and Magnin's 

 opinion that they were intended for acting does not seem to me so absurd as to 

 some German critics. It is a curious and important fact that the earliest Herod- 

 plays show traces of classical knowledge on the part of their writers, e.g. pass- 

 ages are interpolated from Virgil, Sallust, Claudian, etc. See Du Meril, Origines 

 latines du thtdtre moderne, p. 164, and R, p. 9. 



3 As a typical play belonging to a class independent of Church ritual and 

 evidently of scholastic origin, we may note Der Silndenfall, although it is of 

 course of much later date, namely, about 1450. 



