the entry of Charles VI into Paris in 1380. The custom spread throughout France in the
course of the 15th century.
In the northern French provinces, dramatic spectacles were often staged on horse-
drawn wagons similar to the pageant wagons of England. This permitted mimed plays
and tableaux vivants to move with a procession and thus be seen by a greater number of
spectators. From the early 15th century, the Corpus Christi procession in the town of
Saint-Omer, for example, included a mystère that preceded the Sacrament. Staging
practice varied from one city to another in the region, but generally the silent spectacles
were presented either on fixed stages along the route of march or on moving stages in the
procession. The spoken plays were then presented after the procession.
The best-documented example of processional theater comes from the city of Lille,
which had a “Grand Procession” every year on the second Sunday after Pentecost.
Founded in 1270 as a religious procession in honor of the Virgin Mary, it came to include
the trade guilds and other civic institutions. In the 14th century, neighborhood groups
began to stage plays at the procession, and prizes were given for the best ones. In the
course of the next century, the contest was organized by the Bishop of Fools, a dignitary
elected each Twelfth Night by the canons of the col-legiate church of Saint-Pierre. In
1463, the “bishop” issued a proclamation calling for new plays to be written for the
procession based on the Bible, Roman history, or the lives of the saints. He called for
farces as well. Each neighborhood group presented a serious and a comic play, and prizes
were given for the best of each. All were staged on pageant wagons. On the morning of
the procession, the edifying plays were mimed at designated intervals along the route of
march as the procession passed. In the afternoon, all the wagons were brought to the main
square, where the plays were performed with spoken dialogue. In the evening, the crowds
were entertained with the farces.
A remarkable collection of seventy-two plays written for the Grand Procession of Lille
has been preserved in a manuscript in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel,
Germany. The anonymous plays, ranging from 200 to 1,900 lines of verse, were most
likely written by clerics attached to the church of Saint-Pierre. Of the sixty-four biblical
plays, forty-three derive from the Old Testament and twenty-one from the New
Testament. The former treat events in the lives of Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Ruth, David,
and Esther, among others. Five of the plays are drawn from the Roman histories of Livy
and Valerius Maximus and deal with heroes like Actilius Regulus and Mucius Scaevola.
In addition, there are a morality play on the Assumption of Mary, a play on the life of St.
Euphrosina, and a miracle play based on the story of the pregnant ab-bess. The
manuscript was written in the 1480s, but plays of this kind continued to be performed at
the procession in Lille through most of the 16th century.
Alan E.Knight
[See also: ENTRIES, ROYAL; STAGING OF PLAYS; THEATER]
Guenée, Bernard, and Françoise Lehoux. Les entrées royales françaises de 1328 a 1515. Paris:
CNRS, 1968.
Knight, Alan E. Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1983, pp. 117–40.
——. “Processional Theater in Lille in the Fifteenth Century.” In Le théâtre et la cité dans
l’Europe médiévale, ed. Edelgard E.DuBruck and William C.McDonald. Stuttgart: Heinz, 1988,
pp. 347–58.
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