extant example of what is now called the “morality play,” a form of allegorical drama (chiefly popular
between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries) in which the actors personify virtues and vices. In
terms of content, then, Hildegard’s play was unusual and, it could be said, prophetic. In terms of its genre,
however, it was not unusual at all.
By Hildegard’s twelfth century, the sung verse play in Latin was a veritable craze in northern Europe
and England, and church space was increasingly given over on major festivals to dramatic representations
of various kinds. Such plays begin to appear in written sources in the tenth century, and it is probably no
accident that the earliest ones all enact the same episode—the visit of the women (or the Magi) to Christ’s
tomb (or the manger) and their meeting with an angel—that we encountered in the previous chapter in the
form of tropes to the Easter and Christmas Introits. While it would be misleading to allege (as scholars
once believed) that the so-called liturgical drama (performed at matins) grew directly or “organically”
out of the earlier tropes (performed at Mass), it is clear that the church plays were a part—the crowning
part, it is fair to say—of the same impulse to adorn and amplify the liturgy that produced the trope, the
sequence, and all the other specifically Frankish liturgical genres that we surveyed in the previous
chapter.
One of the most fully worked out of these early plays, with detailed directions for the costumes and
the movements of the actors, is found in the Regularis concordia of 973, a code of monastic law
produced by a council of bishops under Ethelwold (ca. 908–984) at the cathedral of Winchester. Its music
is preserved in the famous Winchester Tropers, two great books of liturgical supplements, the earlier of
them roughly contemporaneous with the council. (Unfortunately the Winchester Tropers are both notated in
staffless neumes, and their contents cannot be reliably transcribed for performance.)
Like the tropes and sequences, the church plays evolved—between the tenth and twelfth centuries—
from a prose into a verse genre. Twelfth-century liturgical dramas were elaborate composites of newly
composed versus (music set to verse texts in the latest Frankish style), older hymns and sequences, and
Gregorian antiphons, these last being retained as a kind of scriptural allusion or invocation. Their
subjects included Peregrinus plays (dramatizations of the risen Christ’s appearances to his disciples),
shepherds’ plays for Christmas, the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents (sometimes called the “Play of
Herod”), the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the Raising of Lazarus, the miracles of St. Nicholas, and the so-
called Ludus Danielis, the “Play of Daniel.”
The largest single source of these twelfth-century verse plays is the so-called Fleury Play-book, a
manuscript copied at the Benedictine monastery of St. Benoit at Fleury-sur- Loire near Orleans, the burial
place of King Philip I of France (d. 1108). The best-known single item in the repertory is the Play of
Daniel, thanks to its spectacular revival in 1958 by Noah Greenberg’s New York Pro Musica ensemble, a
milestone in the “early music” performance movement (a recording was still in print as of 2001). It was
composed by students at the Cathedral school of Beauvais for the Feast of the Circumcision (January 1):
“In your honor, Christ, this Daniel play was written at Beauvais, the product of our youth,” the first words
proclaim. In this treatment, the Old Testament story of the prophet Daniel and his deliverance from the
lion’s den (vividly evoked in prescribed sets and costumes) is turned at the end into a prophecy of the
coming of Christ: Ecce venit sanctus ille, / sanctorum sanctissimus, Daniel sings: “Behold, he comes,
the Holy One, the Holiest of Holies,” followed by a traditional Christmas hymn and the ancient hymn of
thanksgiving, Te Deum laudamus, the concluding chant at matins, to which the whole foregoing
complement of dramatic verses, processional songs, and expressive lyrics could be interpreted as a huge
explanatory preface or trope.
The processional songs that accompany the entrances and exits of the dramatis personae in the Play
of Daniel are labeled conductus (escorting-song) in the manuscript rubrics, one of the earliest uses of a
term that later became synonymous with versus, or freely composed Latin song in verse. Ex. 3-11 gives