THE PERFORMERS IN THE PASSION-PLA Y 365 



reason of their corporate capacity as Mastersingers, or 

 members of guilds and brotherhoods. Thus Sebastian 

 Wild, tailor and mastersinger of Augsburg, wrote and 

 published in 1566 a passion-play which was afterwards 

 one of the chief components of the earliest Oberam- 

 mergau text. 1 We hear also in the same century of the 

 Mastersingers of Augsburg giving performances of the 

 Stoning of Stephen, the Eesurrection, and the Birth of 

 Christ. The brotherhoods and guilds of Freiburg in the 

 Breisgau appear to have been as active as the Master- 

 singers of Augsburg. Freiburg had at one time what 

 we may fairly term a processional passion-play, every 

 scene of which was undertaken by a distinct guild or 

 brotherhood. 2 Each set of actors in costume, perhaps 

 forming a tableau, either marched or were drawn on a 

 car, accompanied by the members of their guild, through 

 the streets of the town to the market-place, where on 

 arrival they recited the portion of the passion allotted 

 to them. It is probable even in Germany that in 

 some processional plays the same scene was occasionally 

 repeated at several points. At Freiburg the guild of 

 painters acted the Fall, in which the Devil carried the 

 tree of knowledge ; the brotherhood of journeymen- 

 coopers, the Sacrifice of Isaac ; the guild of bakers, the 

 Annunciation ; the tailors, the Magi and Our Lady in 



1 See D, pp. 190-197, 229, 230 ; and compare H, pp. 203 et seq. 



2 In England religious plays were constantly given by the guilds. At Chester 

 the tanners performed Lucifer's Fall, and the clothmakers the Creation, etc. 

 There was a special guild for the play of the Lord's Prayer at York, where the 

 trade guilds performed the Corpus Christi play, and there were pageant guilds at 

 Beverley (see Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, E.E.T.S., p. 34, and the text of 

 the statutes). The guilds of Coventry and those of Newcastle-on-Tyne had also 

 elaborate Corpus Christi plays. A processional play undertaken by the guilds of 

 Lbbau is noticed in Flogel, Geschichte der Grotesk-Komischen, p. 264. 



