The grotesque little figures are a beautiful illustration of mediæval sense of humour. From "Fac-similes of Biblical Manuscripts." By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.] * * * * * The Bible and mediæval art brings before us another feature of civilisation, which is important, indeed, in our own time and which one would scarcely think of as originating with the Bible. I mean the theatre. The old classical drama and comedy had entirely died out. Plautus and Terence were read in the monasteries, not played, and so were the Biblical comedies by Hrotswitha, of which we have spoken, intended to be read only, not played. There was nothing but jugglers, jesters, and dancers. On festival days people amused themselves by frivolous masquerades, which were looked upon by the church authorities with suspicion and contempt as survivals of heathen rites and therefore to be frowned upon and abolished. Things took quite a different turn when some of the clergy began at Christmas and at Easter to present the sacred story in acted form in order to illustrate the lesson. They did it inside the church, directly before the altar. It was nothing but a dialogue, developed out of the lessons from the Scripture, the angel addressing Mary, the shepherds coming to see the child, the three Marys at the tomb and the angel speaking to them, and so on, as simply and plainly as it was told in the Bible and as it was usually painted on the walls of the church. The people took delight in these representations and they were soon enlarged. They had to be removed from the choir to the front of the church, the steps of the entrance forming the stage. Soon more and more persons appeared on the stage; the laity joined the performers; the guilds (the trade-unions) undertook the performance of the play, and out of these naïve little representations of the birth of Christ or his passion and resurrection sprang gorgeous miracle-plays which sometimes lasted four days and brought the whole story from the creation to the last judgment before the bewildered eyes of the spectators. Nothing could make the Biblical history so familiar to the people as these plays, in which hundreds took part as performers and thousands attended as onlookers. There was but little art. They had no scenery; the actors simply moved about in the open space. But it was highly realistic. We are told that they nearly killed the man who was acting Judas Iscariot. It was also amusing. Mediæval piety did not refrain from putting in just before the crucifixion a sarcastic dialogue between the blacksmith, who had to provide the nails, and his wife, ending in a scuffle between them. People liked to see this. It was on account of these undignified scenes, which kept increasing, that the plays were abolished by secular and ecclesiastical authorities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when through humanism and the Reformation taste and piety had been refined.