DRAMA 571: Religion, Performance and Antitheatricality

Using as a discursive center the supposed “rebirth” of drama in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church in the tenth century after theatricality had been banned by that very institution hundreds of years earlier, this course looks at the push and pull relationship between performance and Christian doctrine and public practice. From the condemnations of spectacle by Tertullian and Augustine to the antitheatrical pamphlets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we engage transhistorically with how the church has felt about theatre and, for instance, who stands to gain each time it’s banned.