THE GROWTH OF THE PASSION-PLA Y 303 



the dead to life again, and who drives the hardest 

 possible bargain with the three Maries (C, pp. 236 et seq.) 

 It is very significant that in the German sixteenth- 

 century play, with its highly developed medicine-man, 

 the same Latin words are sung by the actors before 

 they speak in the vernacular as occur in the twelfth- 

 century French mystery. 1 



Thus we see that in France as early as the twelfth 

 century the scenic ritual had developed into a fairly 

 complex Church drama ; nor is Germany to judge 

 from manuscript evidence much, if anything, behind 

 hand, for we have from the thirteenth century a play of 

 the nativity with nearly thirty characters and further a 

 passion-play wherein we find transferred to a salve-dealer, 

 from whom Mary Magdalen buys ointment to anoint 

 Christ, the very words used by the mercator to the 

 Maries in the Tours Mystery. 2 Clearly between 1150 

 and 1250 there was some cosmopolitan element at work 

 forcing the pace at which the scenic ritual developed, and 

 introducing folk-elements of a scarcely religious char- 

 acter. This leads us to the cloister scholars as the third 

 factor in the evolution of the passion-play. 



The two German plays to which we have just 

 referred occur in the middle of a manuscript of the 

 thirteenth century which formerly belonged to the abbey 

 of Benedictbeuern, and can hardly fail to have been the 

 production of the cloister scholars. The remainder of 

 this manuscript is occupied with Latin poems of a very 

 typical character. Exactly the same or very similar 



1 The earliest (c. 1300) German passion-play gives a quite original sketch of 

 the pedlar or paltenaere taking out a license from Pilate : see W, i. 



2 See J, pp. 80, 85. 



