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Christian drama or Christian tragedy is based on Christian religious themes.
The Bible contains many drama sequences, the very Betrayal and arrest of Jesus in the new testament is a tragedy. [1]
Through the medieval period churches in Europe frequently performed mystery plays, retelling the stories of the Bible. They developed from the representation of Bible stories in churches with accompanying song. As these liturgical plays became more popular, more vernacular or everyday elements were introduced and non-clergy began to participate. As the dramas became increasingly secular, they began to be performed entirely in the vernacular and were moved out of the churches by the 13th or 14th century.
These religious performances were taken over by the guilds, with each guild taking responsibility for a particular piece of scriptural history. From the guild control they gained the name mystery play. The mystery play developed into a series of plays dealing with all the major events in the Christian calendar, from the Creation to the Day of Judgment. By the end of the 15th century, the tradition of acting these plays in cycles on festival days (such as the Feast of Corpus Christi) was established across Europe.
By the 15th and 16th century the form had developed into the morality play. These were allegories, in which the protagonists met personifications of various moral attributes, the net effect being the encouragement to live a virtuous life.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, theatre was generally seen as wicked, and the church made attempts to suppress it. In the United States, condemnation of the theatre was widespread in the eighteenth century; in 1794, President Timothy Dwight IV of Yale College in his "Essay on the Stage" declared that "to indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure: the immortal soul."
In the twentieth century churches, particularly evangelical churches, rediscovered the use of theatre as a form of outreach and as a valid art form.
In Britain in the early twentieth century, it was illegal for any human actor to portray a divine personage on stage, placing severe restrictions on Christian theatre. The groundbreaking 1941-1942 radio drama The Man Born to Be King shattered this taboo, by not only including Jesus as a character, but giving him 'ordinary' speech rather than 'biblical' language. (Radio portrayals were not covered by the law, but the piece drew huge complaints nonetheless.)
T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral explored Christian themes of martyrdom and sacrifice, as well as church history.
In the 1970s, many plays were produced dealing with Christian subjects, notably Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell . At approximately the same time, many churches were again turning to drama as a means of outreach, and as a valid art form. Small Christian theatre companies began to spring up in Britain and America. Covenant Players was founded in 1963 to produce Christian plays written by its founder.
The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events relating to first-century Christianity. The New Testament's background, the first division of the Christian Bible, is called as the Old Testament, which is based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible; together they are regarded as sacred scriptures by Christians.
Mystery plays and miracle plays are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They told of subjects such as the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, and the Last Judgment. Often they were performed together in cycles which could last for days. The name derives from mystery used in its sense of miracle, but an occasionally quoted derivation is from ministerium, meaning craft, and so the 'mysteries' or plays performed by the craft guilds.
Drama was introduced to Britain from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose.
The Passion Play or Easter pageant is a dramatic presentation depicting the Passion of Jesus Christ: his trial, suffering and death. The viewing of and participation in Passion Plays is a traditional part of Lent in several Christian denominations, particularly in the Catholic and Evangelical traditions; as such Passion Plays are often oecumenical Christian productions.
Dispensationalism is a theological framework of interpreting the Bible which maintains that history is divided into multiple ages or "dispensations" in which God acts with his chosen people in different ways. The term "dispensationalism" is attributed to Philip Mauro, a critic of the system's teachings in his 1928 book The Gospel of the Kingdom.
A sacred language, holy language or liturgical language is a language that is cultivated and used primarily for religious reasons by people who speak another, primary language in their daily lives.
Biblical criticism is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible. During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events behind the texts, as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed, would lead to a correct understanding of the Bible. This sets it apart from earlier, pre-critical methods; from the anti-critical methods of those who oppose criticism-based study; from the post-critical orientation of later scholarship; and from the multiple distinct schools of criticism into which it evolved in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The Words of Institution are words echoing those of Jesus himself at his Last Supper that, when consecrating bread and wine, Christian Eucharistic liturgies include in a narrative of that event. Eucharistic scholars sometimes refer to them simply as the verba.
The Chester Mystery Plays is a cycle of mystery plays originating in the city of Chester, England and dating back to at least the early part of the 15th century.
An overview of the theatre of France.
Liturgical drama refers to medieval forms of dramatic performance that use stories from the Bible or Christian hagiography.
An Easter Drama is a liturgical drama or religious theatrical performance in the Roman Catholic tradition, largely limited to the Middle Ages. These performances evolved from celebrations of the liturgy to incorporate later dramatic and secular elements, and came to be performed in local languages. They were succeeded by the Passion Plays.
Christian literature is the literary aspect of Christian media, and it constitutes a huge body of extremely varied writing.
Abrahamic religions believe in the Mosaic covenant, also known as the Sinaitic covenant, which refers to a covenant between the Israelite tribes and their God, including their proselytes, not limited to the ten commandments, nor the event when they were given, but including the entirety of laws that their legendary patriarch Moses delivered from God in the five books of Torah.
Medieval theatre encompasses theatrical performance in the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century and the beginning of the Renaissance in approximately the 15th century. The category of "medieval theatre" is vast, covering dramatic performance in Europe over a thousand-year period. A broad spectrum of genres needs to be considered, including mystery plays, morality plays, farces and masques. The themes were almost always religious. The most famous examples are the English cycle dramas, the York Mystery Plays, the Chester Mystery Plays, the Wakefield Mystery Plays, and the N-Town Plays, as well as the morality play known as Everyman. One of the first surviving secular plays in English is The Interlude of the Student and the Girl.
A mansion stage is a stage for theatrical performances. They originated in churches where they were small wooden platforms with supports and a roof. Mansions were stage structures used in medieval theatre to represent specific locations, such as Heaven or Hell. The actors would move between these mansions as the play demanded. The acting area of the stage was called the platea, and mansions were placed around the platea. As the actors moved between the mansions, the platea would take on the scenic identity of each mansion. In England, pageant wagons were used for the cycle dramas to hold the mansion, the plateau, and a dressing area. These were used to move the scene from one audience to the next, unlike in the church where the mansions were stationary and both the performer and the congregation would move from mansion to mansion.
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Christianity:
Passion Plays in the United Kingdom have had a long and complex history involving faith and devotion, civic pageantry, antisemitism, religious and political censorship, large-scale revival and historical re-enactments. The origin and history of Passion Play in the UK differs substantially from Passion Plays in Europe, South and North America, Australia and other parts of the world.
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