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The Birth of the History Play: Saint, Sacrifice, and Reformation

If the origins of Greek tragedy are presided over by "the grotesque shadow of a goat," the traditions of modern European drama are historically under the shadow of the Christian sacrifice.1 In what follows I will be exploring the impact of Reformation theology and politics upon two ritual dramas: the Mass and the saint plays. The displaying and resacrifice of Christ, on the one hand, and the representation of the martyred saints, on the other, were both "dramas" based upon the re-creation of past events. The saint plays, it is now known, particularly emphasized native "British" or English history; through my reconstruction of the plays on St. Thomas Becket, I will suggest a new genealogy for the English history play. The alteration and suppression of medieval cultural forms drove their energies into new channels, creating a new form of historical drama, in which a sense of commemoration takes precedence over the sense of presence. The Protestant Reformation brought to the Mass, and specifically to the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, a revolutionary change which was historicizing in conception. In the Catholic Mass, the sacrifice or oblation of Christ is understood to happen again in the consecration. This sacrifice is "present" in two senses of the word: the sacrifice happens in the present moment, and Christ's body is present physically in the Eucharist. The Mass represents a past event, the sacrifice of Christ; yet that event is understood somehow not to be past, but rather to be perennially repeated through the efficacy of the ritual. Witnessing the resacrifice of Christ brings the spectator-I use the term because most attendants at a medieval Mass were not communicants-to a "timeless" cultural site, there to contact the presence of the dead.2 But in Reformation England, the service for the Lord's Supper, created mainly by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer