Why was theatre outlawed during the medieval times?

Answer 1

The church banned the plays as during the medieval times, the Roman Empire had started to decline. As such, they could no longer support the entertainment industry. This led to banning of theatres by the Roman Catholic Church.This was done to prevent further building of theatres and destabilizing the economy further.

Edited 3/4/11 By JLovellActing:

I am unaware of any economic factors that contributed to the Catholic Church's ban of theater in Medieval Europe. However, one must remember that the Catholic Church was not only the largest religious organization, but also the most powerful political and economic organization of Medieval Europe.

There appears to be extensive evidence supporting the Church's ban on theater as an ideaological campaign to destroy Pagan culture. Theater prior to the Middle Ages was Greek and Roman. The Pagan and polytheistic views of Greek and Roman culture did not conform with the Christian view of the world. Since literacy was not commonplace among the majority of people, theater, along with oral tradition, served an important method of teaching morality and passing information from generation to generation.

Banning theater allowed the Church to prevent the propagation of Paganism ensuring that Christianity became the dominant religious viewpoint across Europe. The Church claimed that theater was sinful in its themes, and also that actors were, in effect, liars and deceivers. The act of portraying a character was synonomous with lying as the actor is pretending to be someone or something that he is not. Through these and other methods, the Church effectively destroyed classical theater which would not be revived for another thousand years with the birth of the Renaissance.

This attack against Classical theater gave rise to a new type of theater in England known as the Mystery Cycle. This was a yearly cycle of plays that rotated through different towns in what is now the United Kingdom portraying different scenes of the Stations of the Cross, the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and other Biblical themes. These tableaux originally were nothing more than verbal perfomances of liturgical texts by Church members until 1210 when the Pope forbade clergy from acting in public. At this time the local craft guilds took over the performances which eventually evolved into the dominant form of organized performance in Medieval Europe. Mystery or Miracle plays coupled with the Renaissance gave rise to Comedia D'ellarte and other forms of early professional theater and were the first plays performed on a regular basis by Shakespeare's troupes.

In addition to effectively destroying Greek and Roman theater and facilitating the abandonment of interest in Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, the Church's campaign against theater also gave rise to numerous allegations that the Church regularly denied actors Last Rites and prohibited their burial in Catholic Cemetaries.

-Bachelor of Arts - Theater Performance

Hofstra University

Answer 2

because no one liked it