314 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



sings his part. 1 A play which, at the moment of its 

 climax, the death on the cross directs that the chief 

 part is to be sung and gives the music can only be 

 classed as an opera. Hitherto the musical side of the 

 passion-play does not seem to have been sufficiently 

 emphasised ; it may fairly be called the parent of the 

 modern oratorio. Thus we see the song of the old 

 heathen folk-festival appearing in a new form in the 

 religious drama ; as we shall see later, it was not long 

 before an excuse was found for the introduction of the 

 dance. 



With the rapid growth of the passion-play, when 

 once the folk-element had become predominant, we can- 

 not now deal at length ; indeed, the material necessary 

 for a complete review of its later growth is only just 

 being published. 2 It must suffice to say that, literally 

 and figuratively, the folk carried the religious drama 

 from the Church onto the market-place. 3 There, at the 

 end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth 

 centuries, it attained to its fullest bloom. A sketch of 

 such a fully developed play I shall later place before 

 the reader, meanwhile it is needful to say something of 

 the mediaeval stage and its accessories. 



1 F, pp. 120-125. See also p. 348, and the stage-directions of almost all the 

 passion-plays already cited. 



2 Kg. in 1882. 



3 Probably the first step to the market-place was the churchyard, or, as in 

 Freiburg, the cathedral close. Of course the drama did not at once, or indeed 

 ever entirely, desert the church. Plays appear in England to have been given 

 in connection with the churches even after the Reformation : see Appendix II. 

 At the beginning of this century Magi-plays were still performed after mass in 

 some of the churches of Upper Bavaria (see R, p. 34). At Zuckmantel, even in 

 this century, the first part of the passion-play was acted in the church, the^cruci- 

 fixion on a neighbouring hill (see Y, p. 11). 



