Rules of exchange in mediaeval plays and play manuscripts

Abstract

The so-called Fleury Playbook (Orléans, Bibl. de la Ville, ms 201, pp. 176-243) may -as C. Clifford Flanigan pointed out many years ago 1 -be taken to indicate an early interest in dramaticity as a genre characteristic. The probably twelfth-century collection of ten Latin musical representations consisting of four Saint Nicholas plays, two representations belonging to the Christmas cycle, two to the Easter cycle, a Conversion of St. Paul and a Raising of Lazarus has been discussed more than most other sources of Latin so-called music drama. Some of these representations show connections to liturgical offices for feasts with which their narratives have obvious links (by using traditional liturgical items as is the case of the texts from the Easter and the Christmas cycles), others (as some of the St Nicholas texts) display no such liturgical links. Generally speaking the collection does not specify a performance context for its texts, but the use of a liturgical item from the relevant feast (or a general liturgical item such as the Te deum) may in some cases -with greater or lesser probability -point to a particular position within the services for that day. This situation formed the background for Flanigan's observation. The texts which scholarship since they were discovered in the nineteenth century had understood as "liturgical dramas" were usually found in liturgical books for the Office of the Hours or the Mass, copied into their particular place within the liturgical day. In contrast, the collected ten representations of the Playbook seem to belong to completely different parts of the liturgical year (comprising among other days St Nicholas Day (6 December), Epiphany (6 January), Holy Innocents (28 December), Easter Day, Second Easter Day, the Conversion of St Paul (25 January), and possibly the feast of St Lazarus (17 December), mentioned in the order of the texts in the Fleury Playbook. As already stated, a number of these attributions to the calendar are rather uncertain. 2 In other words, the main principle behind the collection is not liturgical.