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degree to revive. Apparently ashamed of their A.D. own degenerate productions, the enlightened

to the annihilation of the abuse. At the first and second Councils of Arles, held under Constantine the Great,* A. D. 314 and A.D. 320, players were excommunicated by the assembled prelates; and in the subsequent and numerous councils held at Carthage, Constantinople, and elsewhere, the severest penalties of the church were denounced against all frequenters of theatres, especially the clergy. Nor were the efforts of these pious fathers, though slow, altogether without effect; and Saint Augustine, in the beginning of the fifth century, dwells with evident pleasure on the incipient disappearance of the abomination. "In what particular," he exclaims, "is the happiness of those who have embraced Christianity diminished, unless it be in the abandonment of those pleasures which tended to abuse, to pervert the blessings conferred by providence, or unless they consider this a gloomy period in which, throughout almost every city, we can trace the gradual disappearance of theatres, those haunts of wickedness and hot-beds of pollution."+

Still, however, even at this debased era, the works of the

cle Drama, in the Supplement to the Encycl. Brit. by Sir Walter Scott. Voltaire, Mélange Philos. v. ii. des divers changem. arriv. à l'art Trag. p. 491.

* Glorying in the hostility manifested by Constantine the Great "to stage playes," Prynne gives him with exultation the title of "an Englishman born;" alluding, perhaps, to the monkish tradition preserved by Jeffrey of Monmouth, that Helena, the mother of Constantine, was daughter to King Coil, who is fabled to have reigned in Essex in the third century.

"Nisi forte hinc sint tempora mala, quia per omnes pæne civitates cadunt theatre caveæ turpitudinum et publicæ professiones flagitiosorum." De consensu Evangel. l. i. c. 33.

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A.D. body of the people turned with avidity towards the literature of their ancestors, and by degrees

early dramatists were not totally abandoned in Greece, and Tertullian and Augustine, in their fulminations, both specify distinctly the existence of tragedy and comedy; nay, even till late in the annals of the empire, the performance of the dramas of Sophocles, Eschylus, and Euripides, formed the occasional amusement of the Byzantine Greeks.*

Of the history of the stage, however, after the removal of the seat of empire to the Bosphorus, our details are meagre in the extreme, nor have any of its historians attempted to pursue its revolutions during the gloomy period which ensued. The fullest materials for an inquiry into the state of the stage during the middle ages, would perhaps be found in the enactments of the various ecclesiastical councils, which successively inveighed against their existence and their patrons; and where the particulars of the numerous forms in which the evil presented itself are often detailed with considerable accuracy. Thus, the 62d Canon of the sixth Council of Constantinople, in A. D. 680, makes a curious mention of some of the amusements then popular in the Eastern empire.‡

"Canon. 62. Kalendas quæ dicuntur, et vota bru

Mill's Theod. Ducas, vol. ii. p. 168.

+ Schlegel dismisses this period in a few lines, by observing, that from the decline of the stage in the first ages of Christianity, a period of nearly a thousand years elapsed ere a legitimate drama was revived in Europe (vol. i. p. 24); and Signorelli, though he has examined its history with much more assiduity than Schlegel, is equally brief and unsatisfactory in his account of the theatres of the middle ages. Surias, tom. ii. p. 1049. Carranza, fol. 195.

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the passion for authorship was abandoned for A.D. domestic study, and the culture of their ancient

malia quæ vocantur, et qui in primo Martii mensis die fit conventus, ex fidelium civitate omnino tolli volumus; sed et publicas mulierum saltationes, multam noxam exitiumque afferentes, quin etiam eas, quæ nomine eorum qui falso apud Græcos dii nominati sunt, vel nomine virorum ac mulierum fiunt saltationes ac mysteria more antiquo et à vita Christianorum alieno, amandamus et expellimus; statuentes ut nullus deinceps muliebri veste induatur, vel mulier veste viro conveniente. Sed neque comicas, vel satyricas, vel tragicas personas induant, neque execrandi Bacchi nomen, uvam in torcularibus exprimentes, invocent; neque vinum in doliis effundentes, risum moveant, ignorantia vel vanitate ea quæ à dæmonis impostura procedunt exercentes. Eos ergo qui deinceps aliquid eorum, quæ scripta sunt, aggredientur, uti ad horum cognitionem pervenerint, si sint quidem clerici, deponi jubemus; si verò laici, segregari."

Of this enactment, I subjoin the quaint translation of Prynne, (p. 583.)

"Can. 62. Those things that are called kalends, and those that are named winter wishes, and that meeting which is made upon the first day of March, wee will shall be wholly taken away out of the citty of the faithfull; as also wee wholly forbid and expell the publike dancing of women, bringing much hurt and destruction; and likewise those dances and mysteries that are made in the name of those who are falsly named Gods among the Grecians, or in the name of men and women, after the ancient manner, farre differing from the life of Christians; ordaining that no man shall henceforth bee clothed in woman's apparell, nor no woman in man's aray. Neither may any one put on comicall, satyricall, or tragicall vizards in enterludes; neither may

A.D.

1462. tongue. tongue. It was to this revolution that we are indebted for the host of illustrious scholars,

they invocate the name of the execrable Bacchus, when as they presse their grapes in wine-presses; neither pouring out wine in tubbes, may they provoke laughter, exercising those things through ignorance or vanity, which proceed from the imposture of the Divel. Those, therefore, who hereafter shall attempt any of these things that are written, after they shall come to the knowledge of them; if they be clergymen, we command them to be deposed; and if laymen, to be excommunicated."

In this reference to Bacchus, we may still trace the existence of an ancient custom, to which tragedy and the stage were indebted for their origin; and during the existence of a regular drama in Greece and Rome, the altar of this patron of the art was invariably placed in the theatres of the two nations. The characters introduced in the interludes referred to above, appear, however, to have shortly after ceased to be confined to classical originals; and in retaliation for the fulminations of the church, its functionaries were occasionally made the subject of satirical or ridiculous exhibitions. The 16th Canon of the eighth Council of Constantinople, held in A. D. 867 or A. D. 870, prohibits, under severe penalties, the countenancing of practices so inimical to the dignity of the prelacy and clergy.

"Colligere licet," say the assembled bishops, "solenne fuisse in aulis principum statis quibusdam diebus, componere aliquem laicum insignibus episcopalibus, qui et tonsura et cæteris ornamentis personatum episcopum ageret; et creâsse etiam ridiculum patriarcham, quo se oblectarent. Quæ omnia ut in dedecus ecclesiæ accersita, prohibentur sub gravibus censuris."

From which it would appear, not only that the Patriarch

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who, about the period of the downfall of their A.D. country's independence, awoke in Italy and

himself was exposed to these indignities, but that the practice was patronized by the highest orders of Constantinople. As the nation by degrees assumed a more theological character, and the guardians of religion discovered that their efforts to annihilate the evil of theatres were abortive, they seemed to have applied themselves to the reformation of that which they could not totally eradicate. As the popular subjects of the original drama in Greece were drawn from their own mythology; in like manner we find, about the tenth century, that interludes, drawn from the relations of the sacred writings, and the lives of the saints, were introduced and patronized by the clergy of the East. The invention of these religious mysteries is attributed by Cedrenus to Theophylact, about A. D. 990;* and their first performers appear to have been the inferior clergy of Constantinople, whose lives. and morals, if one may judge from the frequent censures of the Councils, were by no means remarkable for purity. In their hands, these pious subjects quickly began to be contaminated, by the introduction of other ludicrous and less edifying characters, amongst which, personifications of the Devil appear to have been remarkably popular, and are censured in the regulations of several of the Councils. The last extract I shall make is from the canons of the Synod of Langres in 1404, when the prevalent habits of the clergy, and their

* This Theophylact, whom Cedrenus calls Patriarch of Constantinople, can scarcely be the same who was Bishop of Acris, in Bulgaria, in 1070, and wrote the Пaideia Barının, a treatise intended for the instructors of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, son to Michael VII. Parapinaces; yet we find no other of the name about this period.