Whether her dramatic efforts were an isolated phenomenon or not, must remain undecided, but it is reasonable to assume that any work surviving to the present day is but a sample of much else of the same sort that has disappeared in the course of time. Still all we would claim for them, apart from their intrinsic value and interest, is that they helped to keep up continuity in the tradition of drama. The gradual movement in the Church towards elaboration in its services which began in the ninth century,—a movement which led to the dramatising of the Mass, out of which the liturgical drama, and eventually the miracle-play, were evolved,—was a popular movement. To a people ignorant of Latin, yet fond of shows, it provided instruction and diversion alike. Roswitha, on the other hand, avowedly wrote for the literary world, and with a special end in view as regards that world. To attain this end, she set before her, as her master in style, Terence, who himself had aimed at a high ideal of artistic perfection, and of whom it has been said that he perpetuated the art and genius of Menander just as a master engraver perpetuates the designs of a great painter whose works have since perished. Still, in spite of the glamour of the style to which she aspires, and poetess though she is by nature, her plays reflect the handiwork of the moralist rather than that of the artist, for though beauty charms her by the way, her goal is moral truth, and to this all else must yield. If we would see the beauty of holiness as she saw it, we must enter in spirit within the shrine of her thought and feeling, just as the traveller, standing without the simple brick exterior of the tomb of Galla Placidia, at Ravenna, must penetrate within if he would know of the beauty there enshrined. “Il faut être saint, pour comprendre la sainteté.”
The subject which dominates her horizon is that of Chastity. Treated by her with didactic intent, this really resolves itself into a conflict between Christianity and Paganism,—in other words, between Chastity and Passion,—in which Christianity triumphs through the virtue of Woman. But at the same time Roswitha neither contemns marriage nor generally advocates celibacy. She merely counsels, as the more blessed, the unmarried state. Yet even so, we feel that beneath her nun’s garb there beats the heart of a sympathetic woman, whose emotional self-expression is but tempered by the ideals of her time and her surroundings.
Another important element to be taken into account in her plays is the part she assigns to the supernatural. It is impossible to develop character with any continuity when the supernatural, like some sword of Damocles, hovers continually overhead, ready to descend at any moment and sever cause from effect. Such a sword was the Divine Presence to Roswitha. When her plot requires it, she introduces a miracle, converting a character, at a moment’s notice, and in a way that no evolution could possibly effect, into one of a totally different kind. Still to her audience such a dénouement would be quite satisfactory. With her, sudden changes and conversions but reflect the ideas which possessed the minds of her contemporaries, who realised God more in deviations from, than in manifestations of, law and order.
Were her plays ever performed? To this question no certain answer can be given, since no record has yet been found of their performance, and the best critics are at variance on the subject. But judging from analogy, there seems to be no reason why they should not have been. We know that as early as the fifth and sixth centuries the monks played Terence, probably on some fête-day, or before their scholars as a means of instruction, and doubtless Roswitha’s plays were also acted on special occasions, such as when the Emperor sojourned at Gandersheim, or the Bishop made a visitation. As they were written in Latin, the literary language of the time, this in itself, even if their themes had appealed to the people, would have prevented them from being performed save before the educated few. So if we would picture to ourselves a performance of one of them by her companion nuns in the Chapter House, or it may be in the refectory, it must be before the Bishop and his clergy, and perhaps also some members of the Imperial family, and lords and ladies of the Court. How refreshing must such an entertainment have been to this distinguished company as it found itself carried away into an atmosphere of poetry and passion, of movement and colour, in place of the sobriety induced by the stiff liturgical dramas that probably formed the usual diversion! Such a drama was that of The Wise and Foolish Virgins, a specially favourite old-world dramatic exercise, dispensed as a sort of religious tonic to womankind, calculated to arouse slumbering souls, or to quicken to still further effort those that did not slumber. For us, its chief interest lies in the antiphonic arrangement of the dialogue, in which we may trace the first germs of characterisation, and in the music, the refrains of which contain the first suggestions, as far as we know, of the principle of the leitmotiv, a principle carried to its most complete development by Wagner. Although the earliest known MS. of it is of the eleventh century, so finished, yet so simple, are its dialogues and refrains, that it seems not unreasonable to infer that the form of the play was well known, either through some earlier MS. or through oral tradition. It is only a slight development of the elegy in dialogue which was performed in A.D. 874, at the funeral of Hathumoda, the first abbess of Gandersheim. This dialogue takes place between the sorrow-stricken nuns, who speak in chorus of their loss, and the monk Wichbert, who acts as consoler. Although its form is liturgical, its subject entitles it to be considered the earliest known mediæval dramatic work extant.
Of Roswitha’s dramas, three seem to stand out as of special interest—Abraham, Callimachus, and Paphnutius. All of these are more or less patchwork adaptations from the legendary débris of antiquity. The first appears to have been taken by Roswitha from a Latin translation of a fourth-century Greek legend.[10] Whilst she does not display any originality in elaborating the story, but keeps carefully to the text—so much so that at times she merely transcribes—she reveals her artistic as well as her psychological instinct by concentrating the essentials, thereby transforming a rather discursive composition into a poignant picture. The subtle touches, the sentiment, and the dialogue so pathetic and so true to nature, make this drama verily her masterpiece, and one worthy of a place beside the delicate and dramatic miniatures of the time. In a few words, here is the story. A holy man, by name Abraham, has abandoned a life of solitude in order to take care of his young orphaned niece. After a few years, she is tempted to a house of ill fame. Some two years later, her uncle, having discovered her whereabouts, determines to exchange his hermit garb for that of a man of the world, and go to the house in the guise of a lover, so as to get an opportunity of speaking with his niece alone. Of course she does not recognise him in his change of costume, and when he asks for a kiss, she puts her arms round his neck, and suddenly detects a strange perfume. Instantly a change comes over her. The scent recalls to her her former unsullied life, and tears fill her eyes. At the fitting moment the uncle makes himself known, and showing her with sweet words of sympathy and encouragement that sin is natural to humanity, and that what is evil is to continue in it, takes her back with him to begin afresh the simple good life.
The second play recounts an incident taken from the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, supposed to take place in the first century. A young heathen, Callimachus, falls in love with a young married woman, a Christian. She dies, and is buried the same day. That night Callimachus goes to the grave, and with the help of a slave disinters the body. Holding it in his arms, and triumphing in the embrace denied to him in life, he suddenly falls dead. In the morning the husband and St. John, coming to the cemetery to pray for her soul, see the rifled grave and the two dead bodies. St. John, at the command of Christ, who appears for but a moment, restores them both to life, and brings to repentance the young man, who, in further amendment of his ways, becomes a Christian. This mere outline of the play is given to suggest points of resemblance between it—the first sketch of this kind of drama of passion, the frenzy of the soul and senses—and the masterpiece of this type, Romeo and Juliet.
Many passages in the plays of Roswitha remind us of Shakespeare, but it is not possible to deal adequately with them here, nor does it seem material to do so. There is no reason why Shakespeare should not have seen a printed collection of her dramas. He, like Dante, seems to have had the power of attracting material from every possible source, and it should not be forgotten what a sensation was caused by Celtes printing in 1501 Roswitha’s MS. But, on the other hand, the similarities we notice may be a mere coincidence, or, as is much more likely, the details in each case may have been common property handed down from one generation to another.
In her play of Paphnutius, Roswitha made use of a story taken from the Historia Monachorum of Rufinus, a contemporary of St. Jerome, who had journeyed through Palestine and Egypt to visit the Hermits of the Desert. The mention, too, at the beginning of Rufinus’s account, of a musician who tells of his retirement to a hermitage in order to change the harmony of music into that of the spirit, evidently suggested to her a discussion on music and harmony, probably adapted from Boëthius’s De Musica. In this discussion lies the chief interest of the play as giving us some idea of the sort of intellectual exercises probably practised by women in convents in the tenth century. The play opens with a truly mediæval scene,—a disputation between a hermit and his disciples on the question of harmony between soul and body, suggested by the want of it in the life of the courtesan Thais. Such harmony should exist, says the holy man, for though the soul is not mortal like the body, nor the body spiritual like the soul, we shall, if we follow the method of the dialecticians, find that such differences do not necessarily render the two inharmonious. Harmony cannot be produced from like elements or like sounds, but only by the right adjustment of those which are dissimilar. This discussion on harmony naturally leads to one on music, which is divided, according to the then received writers on the subject, into three kinds—celestial, human, and instrumental. Music, in the Middle Ages, was, for dialectical purposes, treated in accordance with the Pythagorean theory as interpreted by Cicero in his Somnium Scipionis, who represented the eight revolving spheres of heaven—the Earth being fixed—as forming a complete musical octave. Such celestial music forms the subject of the argument in Roswitha’s play, the music of Earth being merely touched upon. Why, it is asked, do we not hear this music of the spheres if it exists? To this comes the answer that some think it is because of its continuity, others because of the density of the atmosphere, and others again because the volume of sound cannot penetrate the narrow passage of the human ear. And so with subtle argument, the music of Heaven was often drowned in the din of Earth. Dante, in the Paradiso, lifted the idea once more from Earth to Heaven, and clothed it in a wealth of gorgeous imagery. But it is Shakespeare who, with the magic of a few words, has given the thought immortality.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
•••••
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
In judging of Roswitha’s dramatic work it must be remembered that, in true mediæval spirit fearing to profane what she venerates, she allows herself but little licence with the legends she dramatises. Nevertheless, as has been said, she from time to time shows, in psychological touches, a capacity for originality quite phenomenal for her time and for the literature of the cloister. Still her plays express but a very small part of the whole gamut of human emotions and experiences, just as her life was lived in an intellectual world narrow from the point of view of to-day or of the great intellectual age of antiquity. Many causes contributed to this. Intellectually, the Christian world shrank as Paganism was superseded by Christianity, a supersession by no means complete in Roswitha’s day. Of course this nascent Christianity was inconsistent with much of the intellectual life of the ancient world, which was either inextricably interwoven with Paganism, or essentially anti-religious. With its task of laying afresh the foundations of education, politics, and morality, it had to take root and become established in a relatively narrow intellectual field, the boundaries of which had gradually to be broken down, sometimes with violence.