Arnoul GrÉban

1420–1471

Playwright
Musician

A Mystical Dramatist.

Arnoul Gréban, with his brother Simon, is one of the very few named authors of a medieval play of any sort and the first named author of a passion play. He wrote a Mystère de la Passion or Mystery of the Passion of Christ, a strongly visual, lyrical, and carefully structured work of some 35,000 lines containing music and involving a variety of literary styles such as the sermon form, the debate, and the lamentation; the play moves from comic to tragic in tone and back again. Passion plays of this kind were quite popular in France from the late thirteenth century (with the Passion of Paulinus) and were performed as late as 1549. More than 100 performances are recorded at French cities like Arras, Valenciennes, Angers, and Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne.

A Playwright and Teacher.

Gréban was born in Le Mans in France, and seems to have been in religious orders, as he was a student of theology in the early 1450s at the University of Paris and a singer and a performer on the great organ of the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris. It was during this time as a teacher that he is believed to have composed the Mystère de la Passion in about 1451. Against a cosmic backdrop of a sort of Manichaean struggle—that is, a war between the principles of good and of evil—he set the passion of Jesus. The play is of great scope and takes in both Old and New Testament time, beginning with a Prologue describing the Creation and Lucifer's or Satan's rebellion against God and his temptation of Adam and Eve through the serpent. The Trial in Heaven occupies Day 1 with sections on the Annunciation to the Virgin, the Nativity of Jesus, and his enfance or miracles of childhood (a very popular extra-biblical subject). Day 2 of the play concerns the preaching of John the Baptist, Jesus' public activities and ministry, his entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, and then his arrest by the Roman authorities. Day 3 is devoted to the earlier phases of the Crucifixion to the moment when guards are placed at the tomb. Day 4 is entirely occupied with the Resurrection and Christ's ascension to the heavens. Though the exact conditions of these performances are not known, there were at least three performances of Gréban's Passion before 1473 in Paris; it was adapted by a later French dramatist, Jean Michel, and was also performed in the 1490s in the city of Troyes. A lesser known play by Gréban concerns only the Nativity of Jesus, and with his brother Simon he seems to have written a Mystère des Actes des Apôtres in 62,000 lines treating the dispersion of the Apostles through many countries and with highly dramatic episodes of shipwrecks and martyrdoms. This last play was performed at Bourges and at Paris between 1536 and 1541.

The Passion Play Genre.

In addition to the stories of Jesus' passion recounted in the Gospels, passion plays were also based on a variety of extra-biblical materials such as the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, the Golden Legend of Jacob of Voragine, and the Meditations on the Blessed Mary, as well as a popular French narrative poem of the late twelfth century called the Passion des Jongleurs. The early Passion plays, like the Passion of Paulinus, dramatize only the events of Holy Week, commencing the action with Jesus's entry into Jerusalem and concluding it with his resurrection and appearances to his followers, but later ones, such as Gréban's, could be much longer and more complex, forming part of what was called the Trial of Heaven, a sort of court proceeding in which God listens to testimony from personifications called Justice and Mercy about the deceptions of Satan on earth and finally agrees to send his son—through the incarnated Jesus—to ransom or redeem mankind. This Trial idea was codified and developed by the Passion dramatist Eustache Marcadé (d. 1440). The later Passion plays were very long, often requiring many days to perform, and Gréban's appears to have taken four days to complete. In smaller towns, the expanded forms of these plays in performance may have occupied the attentions of nearly all the adults of the community. As is true of medieval drama elsewhere, very few scripts contemporary with the Passion plays survive, as it appears they were memorized and only later written down. But Gréban's Mystère exists in three complete manuscripts and several fragmentary texts.

sources

Maurice Accarie, Le Théâtre sacré de la fin du moyen âge (Geneva: Droz, 1979).

Micheline de Combarieu du Graes and Jean Subrenat, modernizers, Le Mystère de la Passion de notre sauveur Jesus-Christ/Arnoul Gréban traduction et présentation (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

Grace Frank, Medieval French Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).

Paula Giuliano, trans., The Mystery of the Passion. Day Three (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996). [A portion of Gréban's vast Passion play.]

Omer Jodogne, ed., Le Mystère de la Passion. 2 vols. (Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1965–1983).

Anne Amari Perry, ed., La Passion des Jongleurs (Paris: Beauchesne, 1981).

Sewall Shelley, trans., Mistere de la nativité de Nostre Saulveur Jhesu Crist/The Nativity/by Arnoul Gréban (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

Eckehard Simon, ed., The Theater of Medieval Europe (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991).