European Influences and National Tradition in Medieval Hungarian Theater

Although dramatic representation has been said to have been first developed with agricultural rituals, semi-professional and professional acting and theatrical performance cannot be imagined without the development of an urban society and independent town life which established production and trade at a distance from agriculture. Such social conditions, of course, characterized ancient Athens as well as the medieval cities, which were centers of Greek drama and mystery festivities respectively. When the dramatic spectacle is homogeneous, intuitive, and unchangeable, it is nothing more than a ritual. Theater begins with a specialization which generates detached institutions of acting and staging and presupposes an audience and a demand for combining moral teaching or other elements with entertaining matter. Theater means competition. The basis for all these conditions is town life or urbanization with a considerable population, rival guilds, and a cultural atmosphere influenced by monasteries, schools, or aristocratic centers. Theatrical activity requires not only an economical and cultural basis, but also stable political conditions as well. Medieval Hungary was not provided with the ideal conditions for the development of drama present in such countries as England and France. Among the tribes of the Great Migration, the Hungarians had arrived last in Europe. When they occupied the basin of the Carpathian Mountains, they encountered an existing social and cultural system, to which they adapted themselves as a condition of their survival. While the reform of Cluny and the ars nova stirred up Western intellectual life, the Hungarian Church still found that it must occupy itself with the suppression of latent pagan rites among the natives. It was