UC-NRLF PQ 9251 S53 B M 053 515 S3" Bryn Mawr Notes and Monographs ii the play of the sibyl cassandra : : BRYN MAWR NOTES AND MONOGRAPHS II THE PLAY OF THE SIBYL CASSANDRA . J - .. - . - King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (From the Cathedral portal at Burgo de Osma) THE PLAY OF THE SIBYL CASSANDRA By GEORGIANA GODDARD KING, M.A. Professor of the History of Art in Bryn Mawr College Member of the Hispanic Society of America BRYN MAWR COLLEGE Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. New York, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras 1921 ) : Pi? i ' Copyright, 1921, by BRYN MAWR COLLEGE SIBYL CASSANDRA THE PLAY OF THE SIBYL CASSANDRA Venho da coua Sebila onde se esmera e estila a sotileza . . . —Gil Vicente, 1513. The Auto of the Sibyl Cassandra, written by Gil Vicente 1 for performance on Christ- mas Eve in 1503, marks a moment of transition in the history of the Peninsular drama. Vestiges of the liturgical drama appear, for reasons which shall be con- sidered; the new-fangled pastoral, first played just ten years before, by Juan del Encina, before the Duke of Alva, is here apparent and acclimated; a theme more or less humanistic and dear to the early Renaissance here mingles with a strain of pure folk-lore. The art is quattrocento in essence but serene and sure, and Cassandra the sibyl is own sister to Neroccio's sibyl on the pavement at Siena and Perugino's sibyls in the Cambio at Perugia. BRYN MAWR NOTES Elements mingled Art quattro- cento II 2 THE PLAY OF THE Gil Vicente and Spenser Halls of Kings Scholars are used to speaking of Gil Vicente as though his autos pastoriles were like Spenser's eclogues in the Shepherd's Calendar, artificial and courtly essays, merely, in a new style. Spenser says that he imitated Clement Marot; and Gil Vicente, his contemporaries relate, imi- tated Juan del Encina; there is little like- ness else. Unlike Spenser's the pieces are plays, conceived for representation and de- pendent on acting in form and substance both; they descend in the legitimate line, as I hope to show, from the mediaeval and religious drama. Gil Vicente, like Juan del Encina, wrote for courtly and noble personages. The earliest pastorals of the Salmantine musi- cian were acted in the halls of the Duke of Alva; the Christmas Mysteries of the Portuguese poet were similarly intended, like his Four Seasons and The Triumph of Winter. It would seem that the Christmas play was habitually staged in a great hall; at the right moment a curtain withdrawn revealed a creche with figures carved and coloured, in essence just such as Spanish II BRYN MAWR NOTES 1 SIBYL CASSANDRA churches still bring out at the season. While, enhanced by all the resources of lighting and splendid costume, the Divine Persons were thus revealed, members of the household, disguised in appropriate dress of frieze and sheepskins, spoke and sang the poet's words and danced as well. In one of these autos the Three Kings pass by, as splendid in apparel and attendance, doubtless, as Royalty could make them, but they scarcely speak. So in the four- teenth century they had passed through the streets of Milan, 2 a superb cortege: with servants and horses, mules loaded with treasure, and strange creatures from the east, chained apes and hunting leopards, while the church towers rocked with the bells. So in Valencia 3 the huge cars called there roca dragged through the streets figures of actors and professional jongleurs who enacted the Mysteries or assisted. In the courtly world of Castile and Portugal, however, the action was transferred not from the church to the street but from the chapel to the great hall. It is this migration of the actors, ready AND MONOGRAPHS Streets of cities II iSabes de achaque de igreja! Persons Songs II THE PLAY OF THE dressed, so to speak, for the ancient litur- gical mysteries, which must explain what has hitherto been a puzzle insoluble, Gil Vicente's Auto de la Sibila Casandra. The persons are, 4 a comely wayward shepherdess called Cassandra, who will not marry, no not she ! a shepherd Solomon who sighs for her in vain, her three aunts called Persica, Erythraea, and Cimmeria, her three uncles Moses, Abraham, and Isaiah. Had ever shepherdess so strange a kin? Gil Vicente was a rare poet, with a lyrical gift matchless among his peers, comparable only to the best of our own Elizabethan wood-notes. The songs are delicious: a cradle song of the angels, a Praise of Our Lady, Cassandra's disavowal of matri- mony, her uncles' madrigal on the theme of a wilful maid, fair as flowers, ungovern- able as the sea. One may be quoted : To be married I must go; So they say, but I say no. I would rather safe abide Single on this mountain side BRYN M A W R NOTES \ SIBYL CASSANDRA 5 Than at hazard change my state For a good or evil mate. To be married I must go; So say they, but I say no. 5 There is just enough plot to last out a long hour on Christmas Eve: Cassandra has no encouragement to give the shepherd when he woos or her aunts when they reason. She is determined against mar- riage. The familiar arguments are re- hearsed, but the tone is graver than in French pieces. Solomon, who has fetched her aunts from the village, returns and fetches her uncles, and they greet her with offerings, bracelets, rings and a chain, as though they had forgotten their role and were Reyes Magos. They argue the case; Moses relates the creation and Cassandra reminds him that the devil took a hand there: Abraham asks if a good husband would make no difference and thereat she declares herself frankly. There is no man whose temper may not change, God only is immutable, and knowing that God in- tends to be born of a virgin, she intends to Plot Christmas Gifts For the Greeks a god was Cassandra's lover AND MONOGRAPHS II Prophecy The proud sibyl II THE PLAY OF THE be that Virgin. Erythraea confirms her prophecy : He will be laid in a manger and the mother will be virgin still; shepherds and wise kings from the east will come with gifts to adore. Cimmeria too has dreamed and forecast, she has seen a virgin giving suck, and afterwards has seen that same virgin brighter than the sun, crowned with stars and ringed around with a thou- sand damsels. Cassandra reiterates that from her He shall be born, for none can be worthier in virtue or lineage. Then says Solomon, "Cassandra raves!" and turns on his heel. Moses and Isaiah rebuke her, ending on a pretty turn: " God's match- less mother, look you, will be humbly born, will conceive in humbleness, and in hu- mility bring forth." With this a curtain is withdrawn and four angels sing a lullaby. So all adore, in set speeches, and Cas- sandra, still proudly, apologizes: Child, I adore thy potency Steadfastly : At thy feet I say my sin; Since excuse I have none within I am weak; then pity me. 6 BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 7 The three sibyls praise the Virgin alter- nately; the adoration being ended, a song concludes : Lovely is the damsel there, Beauteous and very fair. Tell me, sunburnt mariner, Living out in ships at sea, If any ship or sail or star Be fair as she? Tell me, knight drawn from afar, Clad in splendid armoury, If any horse or arms or war Be fair as she? Tell me, gentle shepherd child, Keeping sheep beneath a tree, If flock or vale or mountain wild Be fair as she? What have all these prophets and sibyls to do with such an eclogue? Nowhere is there the least trace of allegory. The dialogue is pastoral, direct and unmistak- able, the costumes are ritual, plain to be identified. Praise of Our Lady Pastoral yet ritual AND MONOGRAPHS II 8 THE PLAY OF THE History Juan del Encina The history of the presentation of these early plays is, fortunately, known: in the early editions they are headed, and often interlarded, with so-called rubrics, which are half stage -direction and half informa- tion. Of Juan del Encina's we thus know that the First Eclogue was presented on Christmas Eve, "in which are represented two shepherds, one called John and the other Matthew, and the one called John entered first into the hall in which the Duke and Duchess of Alva were hearing matins, and went up to present, in the name of Juan del Encina, a hundred coplas on the same feast, addressed to the Duchess." Another piece was played the same night by four shepherds, called by the name of the four evangelists : and here the text says that "the two shepherds above, John and Matthew, being in the hall where matins were said, to them entered two other shepherds, called Luke and Mark, and all four commenced to reason of the nativity of Christ": 7 very dully, it must be con- fessed. In 1502 the poet was already in Rome, but he had left the Pastoral, rooted II BRYN MAWR NOTES Kinn mju. niojiiuvu SIBYL CASSANDRA 9 and nourishing, behind him. Lucas Fer- nandez, in Salamanca, was to indite many an eclogue, many a "farse or quasi-com- edy," and publish them all in 1514, couch- ing his shepherds' talk, like Encina, in the neighboring dialect called sayagiies. Gil Vicente, in Portugal, was to write his in round Castilian. His debt to Juan del Encina was recog- nized in his own country: Garcia de Re- sende says explicitly that the one inau- gurated the pastoral and the other im- proved it; the passage is famous. 8 Famous too is the Monologue which was his first essay. On June 6th in 1502, two nights after the birth of the heir to the throne of Portugal, the poet disguised as a cow- herd entered the chamber of the Queen Mother to congratulate her on the young prince who was to be John III. The bumpkin is strange at first, and startled, in the palace, but he delivers his lines and calls in shepherds after him who offer to the prince their rustic presents of eggs, fruits, curds, honey, and the like. These, says Theofilo Braga, 9 were the noble gentle- Lucas Fernandez The first play and its players AND MONOGRAPHS II _ _ . 10 The second II THE PLAY OF THE men of the court, the gracious poets of the Cancioneiro; and they were habited in sheepskins, I suppose, like shepherds from the hills. The little play so pleased the queen Dona Lianor, because it was a novelty in Portugal, says the rubric, that she asked for a repetition on Christmas Eve " directed to the birth of the Redeemer"; the poet did as bidden, but in addition he wrote a pretty play between six shepherds. He had a facile and nimble muse: for Twelfth Day thereafter (1503)', he wrote the Play of the Three Kings. is* (£ O^** When Christmas came in(1503^the court was keeping the holy feast at a convent, Enexobregas says the rubric, and another pastoral was wanted for Dona Lianor. Precisely as he had, with great success, made the Wise Men of the...East pass across the stage the year before, so here again Gil Vicente selected figures out of the Christmas mysteries and used them for his pastoral, the prophets and sibyls who prophesied in the old liturgical drama and had never quitted the stage. Theo- filo Braga, recognizing that they came BRYN MAWR NOTES r^itii i *±uw. iaiv/iLLu SIBYL CASSANDRA straight out of the Middle Age, suggests that the pastoral was played in the con- vent chapel, in the midst of the midnight office. This seems hardly credible: Isaiah dancing down the aisle, Abraham and Moses jigging with Cassandra, Solomon cutting a pigeon-wing before the altar, with the sibyls capering three by three in a wild round through the nave, would pre- sent a spectacle that sorts ill with the dignity alike of the Lord Abbot or of the royal guests. Convents in Spain and Portugal built palaces adjacent, and in some hall or chamber of suitable size the creche was installed and curtained off, the court established, and the actors intro- duced. It is more than probable, however, that the rich and characteristic costumes of the actors, of prophets and sibyls, were the property of the monastery, laid up for use annually among copes and chasubles of many colours and devices ; and that the presence of these determined for the ready- witted poet the precise form of his pastoral. Braga, indeed, says casually that the uncles came in dancing, in sheepskin coats : AND MONOGRAPHS 11 Not in church Costumes II 12 THE PLAY OF THE Dance Rubrics Isaiah, Moses and Abraham danced in the auto with Solomon, in chacota, all four singing de folia a cantiga seguint, as shep- herds in mountain dress: 10 but I cannot find this in any edition. The rubric does state, earlier, "entra Erutea, Peresica, y Cimeria em chacota, ellas a maneira de labradoras." This means almost certainly that they bear some sign of their rustic occupations, like figures in the Calendars of Books of Hours, basket or hoe or milk-pail ; but if they are not recognizable as sibyls by their dress, how is the audience to know them? Of Solomon and the prophets the same is true. The rubrics, in any case, are not by Gil Vicente nor yet contemporary. The earliest edition existing is of 1562: there is vague rumour of one put out by Vicente's son in 1557, but the poet is be- lieved to have died, very old, in 1537. The rubrics have entirely the traditional aspect: a son is setting down his memory of what his father told him, long since, of things in that father's youth. They are important, but not impeccable: Theofilo Braga long ago pointed out that they II BRYN MAWR NOTES I I v-»i ■■■ I i v-/ " \ SIBYL CASSANDRA 13 mistake the chamber and the presence where the first performance occurred: and A. Braamcamp Freire shows that the convent of Enexobregas was not founded till 1509, so that the Play of the Sibyl cannot have been acted there in 1503; and of the Play of the Four Seasons, that place and date are similarly irreconcilable. They must be taken with discretion. Given the text, the only way to identify prophets and sibyls seems to be their traditional dress. These costumes, indeed, were both char- acteristic and important. When in the same decade (1499-1507), Perugino was decorating the Cambio at Perugia with symbolic figures of heroes and sages of antiquity, prophets and sibyls, he tricked them out, all, in fantastic costumes from a recent mumming. The Vergos family, working on the great retable of Granollers (1499-1502), set similar prophets in splen- did courtly vesture on the guardapolvo, as the painters before them had done for more than a century, borrowing them always from the Christmas Office. M. Emile sometimes in error Costumes characteris- tic Perugino Verg6s AND MONOGRAPHS II 14 THE PLAY OF THE Baccio Baldini Costumes strange Male 11 has traced the dress of prophets and sibyls alike in the set of engravings at- tributed to Baccio Baldini, to a Mystery of Feo Belcari's that was represented in Florence about 1490. The costumes were current coin. As far back as the figure of Sibylla can be made out, in the cathedral play of Rouen, her dress is characteristic: 12 "coro- nata et muliebri habitu ornata." In the Mystery of Revello, 13 the dress of the sibyls is prescribed elaborately as that of the prophets. The authoritative word on the subject is M. Male's: "Les costumes extraordinaires dont les artistes du XV me siecle revetent les prophetes sont des costumes de theatre. Jeremie, Ezechiel, qui au XIV me siecle ne portent encore qu'un simple tunique et le petit bonnet des Juifs, sont maintenant coiffes de hauts chapeaux aux bords re- trousses, d'ou pendent des chaines de pedes. lis ont des riches fourrures, des ceintures d'orfevrerie, des bourses a. glands. Un si bizarre accoutrement, qui echappe en partie aux lois de la mode, n'a pu etre II BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA imagine que pour un defile solennel, pour une 'montre.' Ces vieillards magnifiques devaient eveiller l'idee d'une mysterieuse antiquite." 14 Conversely, the costume thus known will identify the figures on the stage as readily as that of Harlequin and Columbine. Not now do we need to prove the reciprocal debt of the Mysteries and plastic art or pictorial. A suggestive parallel, perhaps, to this invention of Gil Vicente's, in its retention of themes dear to the Middle Age, may be found in the inlaid marble pavement of the cathedral of Siena. The Renaissance is there, but the Middle Age is not abolished. Down the nave, in the inlay of black and white marble placed there by Sienese artists of the Quattrocento, you find not only parables, the Virtues and the Scrip- ture heroes, as they were carved in the French cathedrals, but Fortune's Wheel, and the Seven Ages of Man, the Emperor on his throne, King David among his musicians, Hermes Trismegistus, the Isle of Fortune as Pinturicchio designed it in 1504, 15 AND MONOGRAPHS Mysteries and the arts A plastic parallel The Pavement of Siena II 16 Ten sibyls The role of Sibylla Toledo II THE PLAY OF THE and the Ten Sibyls as they were placed under the rectorship of Alberto Aringhelli (1482) himself a knight of Rhodes and of S. John of Jerusalem. 15 So Dante, pacing this pavement, would read all the book of it. It is plain, then, when Gil Vicente wrote the Christmas Mystery in 1503 and used the costumes that were at hand, while he was devising, in the pastoral comedy of the opening Renaissance — Mui novas invencoes, d'estilo mui elo- quente — yet he was employing matter consecrated by long use in the liturgical drama of the Middle Age. It is desirable to consider for a moment the role of Sibylla in the medi- aeval mysteries. The French Benedictines, when they re- vised the Office at Toledo in the eleventh century, introduced into it the scene or office of the shepherds, and the sibyl of Christmas Eve. These pieces were trans- lated out of Latin into Spanish in the thirteenth. This statement rests on the authority of an eighteenth -century arch- BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA bishop of Santiago, Fernando Vallejo, and a historical memoir that he composed while still a Canon of Toledo, transcribing therein both the Latin and the Romance versions. The document is still imprinted, it has been mislaid, and I take the mention from Cafiete 16 who knew it. The business of the sibyl was to reason of judgement to come. Sepet has printed the Augustinian sermon which entered into the Christmas lessons, and included the twenty-seven lines of the sibylline verse. 17 From that must be derived the Toledan version, like those of S. Martial de Limoges and Rouen. The Spanish compositions seem to have been real plays. It were a good work to print this MS., if it can be found by searching the archives. Nor is this all known of Spanish use, little though we know of Spain. In the Valencian Breviary of 1464 Villanueva 18 found that the sermon just referred to was read at Christmas matins, and sixty years later the prophecies were given in a semi-dramatic form, the sibyl "having to appear in the pulpit dressed as AND MONOGRAPHS YJ 17 A lost treasure in Toledo Valencia II J 18 THE PLAY OF THE Tarragona Mallorca a woman." This is the hour — the Christ- mas midnight — when Gil Vicente's piece was played. Writing from Tarragona, the learned old Dominican notes that in the sixteenth century "on Christmas Eve they had the sibyl, as I said in Valencia, though perhaps here there was something more like a play or comedy. From that might arise the use of villancicos on that night, which still persists in many cathedrals." A villancico is not precisely a carol, but it is the Spanish equivalent, and Gil Vicente's plays each wind up with one. In 1572 the Rite of the Sibyl on Christmas Eve was abolished in the diocese of Mallorca: two years later the Chapter was petitioned for its restoration, and Mila y Fontanals 19 re- marked, in 1880, that "it subsisted re- cently and I think still subsists." J. B. Trend confirms him under date of 1921: a choir boy still goes up into the pulpit in a strange garb. The sibyl's speech of the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday figures also in Ordinaries of Barcelona and Urgell, the former a MS. of 1400 or thereabouts, the latter printed in Leon in 1545. The figure II BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA of Sibylla, then, with her stately beauty and rich and symbolic dress, was familiar and expected on Christmas Eve at the date which concerns us. The earliest recorded texts, I think, are in the MS. at Toledo, that of S. Martial of Limoges, 20 and the Rouen play preserved by Du Cange: 21 the first goes back to the elev- enth century, the second perhaps also, the third to the fourteenth: one is Spanish, one from Southern France, one is Norman. The liturgical drama lived on, indeed, everywhere, and starting from the same point, seems to run parallel. Every detail recorded, for instance, in early plays pub- lished by Du Meril corresponds so closely to Spanish use that it seems permissible to suppose a fairly complete likeness. The Office of the Shepherds according to the use of Rouen is taken from MSS. .of the four- teenth and fifteenth century: the Office of the Kings at Limoges goes back at least as far. 22 In the former the creche is arranged behind the altar with an image of S. Mary therein; a boy climbs up on the rood- screen (or perhaps on what is called in 19 AND MONOGRAPHS French and Spanish parallel II 20 Played in church Processions and stations THE PLAY OF THE Ritual uses Spanish incorrectly the trascoro, the back of the sanctuary enclosure) to simulate the angel, and the shepherds come in through the choir : in the second, three of the choir come, suitably vested, through the great door of the choir, after the offertory, to make the offerings of the Kings. 23 A third, the Office of the Star according to the use of Rouen, 2i is still more interesting from the liturgical and ecclesiological point of view, with its processions and stations, in aisles and nave, by altars and chapels. Only those perhaps may figure it who know the splendours of the modern use at Toledo, however that be shorn of its elder glories. But, indeed to realize how inevitable, how reverent, how little removed from the ordinary course of festal ceremonies was the iiturgical drama and the Mystery that grew out of it, one has only to recall the rit- ual at Seville or Burgos, Compostella or Cuenca, and before all, at the primatial church of Toledo, with its incessant pass- ings between the sanctuary and the coro, the priests and the chapter; all the missions and messages; the acolytes who go accom- II BRYN MAWR NOTES Y SIBYL CASSANDRA 21 panied, to carry the Kiss of Peace, the canons who come up, yet more accom- panied, to honour the moment of Con- secration, or the interminable and impres- sive Offertory on great days when in due state and rank, their twenty or more copes stiffened with embroidery, their yard-long and two-yard trains trailing scarlet or violet, the entire Chapter come up before the pontiff enthroned in the very altar front, to kiss his gloved hand and throw into a silver dish or a golden salver tinkling silver tokens coined expressly for the cathedral centuries ago. Indeed the Office of Holy Week at Toledo still keeps the dramatic rendering of the daily Gospels, and probably other places in Spain as well. I am not aware if anything is known of the early liturgical drama in Portugal, but in the days of the so-called Benedictine reformation of the Spanish church, which are the days of King Alfonso and Queen Constance and their monks fetched from Cluny, Portugal was still Spain. Prince Henry the husband of Teresa of Portugal was himself a Burgundian, and at Braga Still in Spain Portugal identical AND MONOGRAPHS II > \ L 22 THE PLAY OF THE Processtis prophe- torum The miniature and the theatre and Toledo the reforms will have been alike and the innovations identical. The Christmas play, at the outset, was exclusively concerned with prophecy: it rehearsed the promise, rejoicing in the ful- filment. Plenty of texts are accessible in France. In a MS. of the eleventh century from Limoges, the Mystery of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, 2 ^ which falls in Advent, is im- mediately followed by another which Du Meril calls the Mystery of the Prophets™ and believes was played on Christmas Eve. He cites in evidence a curious passage from Durandus' Rationale: on the other hand, there was a procession of Prophets at Rouen in the fourteenth century — wherein marched Balaam's ass — on the Feast of the Circumcision. 27 It falls in any case within the Christmas season. Here at Limoges the Precentor, calling upon the Jews and the Gentiles, evokes the prophets in turn, and sets them, to pro- phesy, in such a chair as Andre Beauneveu and Jacquemart de Hesdin employed, painting prophets in the Psalters and II BRYN MAWR NOTES ^ SIBYL CASSANDRA 23 Books of Hours for the Duke of Berry- three centuries and more thereafter. They advance in turn: Israel speaks, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Habakkuk, Da- vid and Simeon, Elizabeth and the Baptist, Virgil and Nebuchadnezzar and then Sibyl- la. Her speech is all of Judgement to come : Judicii signum: tellus sudore madescet; Et coelo rex adveniet per saecla futurus, Silicet in carne praesens ut judicet orbem. 2S A thirteenth-century Mystery of the Na- tivity, taken from a. MS. at Munich, recog- nizes the debt to S. Augustine by enthron- ing him "in fronte ecclesiae," on his right stand Isaiah, Daniel and other prophets, on his left "Archisynagogum et suos Judeos." Isaiah has a four-line song with two antiphons to follow; Daniel two stanzas with pretensions to poetry and after another antiphon, "tertio loco Sibilla gesticulose procedat, quae inspiciendo stallam, cum. gestu mobili canet": the four stanzas of her song deal chiefly with the Virgin mother, but the antiphon to it Limoges South Germany AND MONOGRAPHS II : 24 Northern France Out of God's grace II THE PLAY OF THE is, "Judicii signum: tellus . . ." This will be simply the opening triplet of the poem, as in the play foregoing. Aaron and Balaam follow her and the next incident is a long debate between S. Augustine . and Archisynagogus, the prophets sustaining the former in a quotation from S. Bernard's Laetabundus: Si non suis vatibus credat vel gentilibus, Sibyllinis versibus Haec praedicta. 29 From the Play of the Prophets incor- porated in the Mystery of Adam, which is attributed to the twelfth century, 30 Sibylla is omitted, the piece stopping with Nebu- chadnezzar's recitation of the Fifteen Tokens of Doomsday. That was a famil- iar mediaeval substitute for the acrostic lines, and by the time it was finished the audience would have had enough. So much for the importance of the sibyl in the Mystery while it was played before the altar. She is there to testify. She is not however an invariable figure, and when BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA the drama comes out of God's grace into the warm sun, she is hardly seen. The pastorals of Lucas Fernandez and his fel- lows know her not. In the nirity-five Mysteries of the Madrid codex, which in- clude Scripture and dogma equally, she is not named. But she lives on in folk-lore, and the sibyls hold their place in art and even gain ground with the rising tide of humanism. The MS. of the Passion of Revello, 31 though copied as late as 1490, supplies an intermediate form between the earlier and the later mysteries. At the outset there is a prologue of prophecy: twelve sibyls speak and twelve prophets, and Balaam to boot "who is a false prophet." A long Latin rubric gives the names of the sibyls, their age, their bearing and action, and the colour of their garments and their orna- ments : some such passage, it would seem, as Filippo Barbieri published in 1481. 32 But in the scene of the Annunciation pro- phets and sibyls return and rehearse their parts again. Just about contemporary is the play of the Annunication by Feo Bel- AND MONOGRAPHS 25 l« into the warm sun II 26 Feo Belcari and Gil Vicente Twenty prophets ten sibyls THE PLAY OF THE II cari, 33 which opens by the angel who acts as Prologue calling on the prophets to testify, and the list is this: "Noe, Jacob, Eritrea sibilla, Moise, Giosue, Sofonia sibilla, Samuel, David, Persica, Elia, Eliseo, Pontica sibilla, Malachia, Amos, Samia sibilla, Isaiah, Giona, Michea sibilla, Jeremia, Ezechiel, Osea sibilla, Daniello, Abachuch, Cumana sibilla, Egea, Abias, Tiburtina sibilla, Nau, Joel, Zaccheria"; after this the play of the Annunciation proceeds rapidly to a ritual conclusion. Here every third speaker seems to be a sibyl: and the sum of them is ten. D'An- cona adds that it seems desirable to sub- join a sample of another version of the same play from another codex, in which the part of the prophets is much reduced and only Isaiah, Daniel, David and eight sibyls speak. Therewith he begins his quotation at the Proces du Paradis, and the prologue is not in print. In the earlier version printed, by my count there are only six real sibyls, and they are addressed with some relevance to their nature and func- tion: the prophets Zephaniah (Sofonia), BRYN MAWR NOTES k SIBYL CASSANDRA 27 Michah, and Hosea (Zach arias probably also) are dressed in sibyl's costume, and Michah gets in addition a feminine ad- jective; and the other figures are arrayed in this mixed assembly for varied reasons, Joshua, for instance, being one of the Nine Worthies and a splendid figure easy to recognize. It would seem, in short, that this play afforded an exact parallel to Gil Vicente's. In a Christmas play of the Nativity found in the same quattrocento Italian col- lection 34 the prophecies are introduced with more art: when Herod summons his wise men to council, they cite, the first Isaiah, the second the Tiburtine and the third the Erythraean sibyl. At the feast of S. Felice in 1547 they played in Florence an Annunciation with the sibyl who prophe- sied and showed to Octavian the humanity of the 1 Son of God. 35 At Sessa, two years later, for Corpus Christi "at the nuncia- ture were played the twelve sibyls that each spoke of the coming of Christ and of the incarnation, with many fair mysteries: certes it was a fair thing to see." 36 This The Nine Worthies In 16th century Florence Sibyl on the ambo there, 13th cen- tury AND MONOGRAPHS . II J 28 In the Kingdom of Naples France at the Renaissance THE PLAY OF THE II was in the kingdom of Naples and would seem nearer to a Spanish auto. In Florence in 1566 there was a fine play 37 "besides many prophets and sibyls that . . . sing- ing in that simple and ancient mode pre- dicted the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and a Paradise appeared." So much must suffice for the Italian plays. In France the greatest piece, the Mys- tere du Vieil Testament, 38 ends with Octa- vian and the sibyl. u Cy commence le Mistere de Octavien et de sibille Tiburtine, touchant la conception, et autres sibilles." The play is long and dull, the author does not know what to do with the statue com- manded of the Emperor, though the author of the Chester Mysteries could have told him; finally, when Tiburtina has with- drawn, the twelve sibyls appear without looking at each other, raising their eyes to heaven as though foretelling. This play was printed by Pierre Le Dru at some time before 1542: the Dit des Douze Sibylles thus introduced was as popular as the Fifteen Tokens of Doomsday had been : it figured about 1488 in the borders of the BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 29 great Hours of Verard, in the Hours of Louis de Laval before 1489, and in the Hours of Simon Vostre in 1508. 39 The formula is fixed, by now: it is to be re- ferred to Barbieri, with some direct refer- ence to Lactantius. The Story of the Emperor and the Sibyl was one of the marvels of the city of Rome: 40 John of Salisbury and Ralph Higden related it. It is surprising that the Cursor Mundi knew nothing about the Tiburtine sibyl or the founding of Ara- coeli. What he does know is inserted here and there into Old Testament chronology. 41 The Persian sibyl was the first; Than was a sibyl o'Lybie And Apollo with his melodie. The Delphic sibyl foretold the Trojan war: that of Babylon was the fourth. This is flotsam and jetsam of all the ages, with a faint half -consciousness of Cas- sandra and the Pythia and the struggle for supremacy at Delphi, 42 rather astonishing, washing up there on the north of England. The fifth sibyl arrives in the history of Mirahilia Urbis Romae Apollo and the sibyl in conjunction Cursor Mundi AND MONOGRAPHS II 1 30 So Sibyl and Solomon in the frontispiece The legend of the Three Rods The Queen of Sheba II THE PLAY OF THE Maximilla, which is a part of the story of Holy Cross; the Cursor relates how the beam hewn from King Solomon's forests lay across the brook — Till after long and many a day The sibyl came from far away To see and speak with Solomon. When to the city she had come, By the beam laid in her way, — she pulled off her shoes and lifted her skirt and waded the brook with many prophecies of the Tree and also of Dooms- day. When the sibyl and the king Had thus disputed of many a thing The king gave her gifts full fair And so homeward she did fare, But the tree, as I heard say, There it lay, many a day. She is here, of course, neither more nor less than the Queen of Sheba. It remains to add that the sixth sibyl, according to the Cursor, occurs in the time of many prophets, Isaiah, Joel, Hosea, Jonah and others, BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 31 towards the close of the Fourth Age of the World. It was convenient to consider the Cursor Mundi before the English Miracle plays : these are mostly undated, but none can be earlier than the institution of Corpus Christi in 1264. The earliest plausible suggestion for the Townley plays is 1410, and the Chester plays were copied and revised as late as 1591-1606. In the former the sibyl prophesies Doomsday among the prophets. 43 In the latter 44 occurs a long scene of Octavian, during which the Expositor refers to "three suns in the firmament that wonderly together went" with a faint gleam of the dream of the Hundred Suns. These plays illus- trate remarkably the process of incorporat- ing the old Processus Prophetorum of the liturgical drama, or such bits of it as sur- vived: in the Townley plays it follows Jacob and precedes Pharaoh: in the Chester series the prophets are inter- polated into Balaam and Balaak, and the sibyl and the Emperor into the Nativity. In the Limoges MS., by the way, of the English Corpus Christi Plays Processus prophe- torum broken up and fitted ir, AND MONOGRAPHS II N J 32 Pageants at Coventry Rich and traditional dress II THE PLAY OF THE Advent play of the Foolish Virgins, with the prophet play that followed, this proc- ess has begun: they are attached rather cleverly to an Easter play. 45 In all these cases we see the passing of the original drama, till it is adapted and transformed out of recognition. The English plays afford also a parallel case of the costume determining the theme and identifying the figures. There is a record at Coventry of pageants performed for the reception of royalty during the fifteenth century. 46 These were very slight dramatic performances, hardly more than costumed speeches. When Queen Mar- garet came to Coventry in 1456 there were erected and placed, at different points, with set speeches, a Jesse with two prophets, S. Edward and S. John, the Nine Worthies, and S. Margaret. When Prince Edward came in 1474, the townsfolk had out King Richard, the three Patriarchs and Jacob's twelve sons, King Edward, Three Prophets, the Three Kings of Cologne, and S. George. For Prince Arthur they had only the Nine Worthies, the Queen of Fortune, and S. BRYN MAWR NOTES k SIBYL CASSANDRA 33 George. Now the prophets and kings at least are recognizable chiefly by their traditional dress, and supply a fair plebeian parallel to Gil Vicente's use. Now that prophets and sibyls are ac- counted for in the Play of the Sibyl Cas- sandra, what has Solomon to do there? If the others come direct in inheritance from the liturgical drama, yet though Abraham and Aaron, Balaam and the Baptist, Virgil and Nebuchadnezzar all figure in the pro- cession and David is always there, still I know of no play which admits Solomon. I think he is drawn hither in the wake of Sibylla, who is the Queen of Sheba: Solo- mon and Saba stand together on church doorways. In the story of Holy Cross the Queen of the South has the gift of prophecy, as ap- peared in Cursor Mundi. She prophesied the redemption, and there is a Spanish auto on this theme called El Arbol del Mejor Fruto: Calderon collaborated in the writing and recast his share later as La Sibilla del Oriented Saba here is a true Pythoness, she falls into trances, and she AND MONOGRAPHS Solomon and Sheba So Isidore calls her II 34 in Gothic carving at Toulouse Laon Auxerre II THE PLAY OF THE recognizes the Tree of our Salvation, she tests Solomon with the artificial flower, and she makes him fall in love with her: she is Queen of Ethiopia which lies somewhere in the East, and she is black but comely, like the Shunamite in Canticles and the Lybian sibyl of Guidoccio Cozzarelli in Siena cathedral. Here then in the Penin- sula we touch another strain of popular lore again. The early Gothic carvers knew the sibyl, and they present her often with a con- sciousness of archaism, and sometimes it is impossible to know whether a figure be meant for Sibylla or for Saba. Belike they did not well know themselves. In Tou- louse Museum she is preserved with the prophets, among the earliest sculptures from ruined doorways. At Laon she is carved in the archivolt of the north-western doorway, and the opening words of her prophecy are on the stone behind, and she is probably Erythraea. At Auxerre she figures within, on the choir-enclosure, and a crowned head may be seen beside, and I think she is Tiburtina. 48 In 1253 Thomas BRY'N MAWR NOTES C SIBYL CASSANDRA of Celano had written " Teste David cum Sibilla." Before the century was over Erwin of Steinbach had arrayed the ordi- nance for the western doors of the cathedral of Strasburg, much as the Limoges drama presented the same pageant. The northern side is devoted to the old Romanesque theme of the Psychomachy: the southern, to the Wise and Foolish Virgins, headed by the Spouse and the Tempter respec- tively. On the central portal stand the prophets with Solomon and Sibylla, pre- cisely, except for number, as they return two and a quarter centuries later in Gil Vicente's auto. For his own purpose, the Portuguese poet has selected more sibyls. At Strasburg the presence of Solomon is not fortuitous: he is the Wise Man as she is the Wise Woman: with the same inten- tion they had been selected for the doorway at Amiens. At Orvieto, the second buttress is carved with a Tree of the Prophets, mounting in ascent from Abraham, as the third carries a Tree of Jesse: the motive, so far as I know, is unique, though it was copied once AND MONOGRAPHS 35 The Sibyl at Freiburg also Strasburg Master Benedetto carved her so at Parma 12th century Amiens II 36 Orvieto Pulpits THE PLAY OF THE in the chapel of Pedralbes by the son of Ferrer Bassa. 49 Here on the cathedral the sibyl stands among the prophets : the work is Sienese and was executed at some time between 1310, when Lorenzo Maitani began the facade, and 1347, when Andrea Pisano took it over for two years. Those workmen who went from Siena to serve the Duke of Berry, could tell their mates of this, as of the great figures made by the Pisan for the outside of the cathedral and for the pul- pit in Siena. There were sibyls on the Pisan pulpit, and I believe the exquisite figure at Siena called a Virtue, seated and crowned and prompted by an angel, and bearing a scroll long since illegible, was set to repre- sent the Wise Woman like her sisters here and at Pistoja. The sculptor Peregrino had already set the sibyl with three pro- phets in the spandrels of the ambo at Sessa, in the early days of Bishop Pan- dolfo (1224-1259). Younger by two cen- turies, two sibyls, with David and Solomon, stand facing northward, and hidden by the cathedral flank, on the Campanile of Flor- ence. Next Ghiberti modelled the heads II BRYN MAWR NOTES ^ SIBYL CASSANDRA of prophets and sibyls for his earliest doors. Not unmindful of this a century and a half later, the great silversmiths of Cuenca, the Becerril family, set prophets and sibyls on the upper stage of the custodia they were making for the cathedral there. 50 So, far to the west, in Spain, at Leon, among the multitudinous figures that stand about the western doors, along with Church and Synagogue, Solomon and Saba, waits the sibyl, a little apart. She smiles at Solo- mon ambiguously, and shows her scroll, at Burgo de Osma. With Balaam and with Virgil she stands by the tree of Jesse in the window at Chartres, and at Soissons, in a Jesse window, there was a pair of sibyls: perhaps also in the archivolt of the north- western door at Notre Dame of Paris. In the Psalter of Queen Ingeborg, at Chantilly, she stands like a queen crowned, and testifies "omina cessabunt tellus con- fracta peribit," Daniel, Malachi, and Aaron keeping her company. 51 In the church at Bethlehem Quaresimus saw the Erythraean sibyl, and her testimony was, "E coelo rex adveniet." M. Male suggests 37 Both of the doors of Ghibertl and the Custodia of Becerril Portals of Spanish cathedrals In the West AND MONOGRAPHS II __ - 38 In the East Mount Athos S. Angelo in Formis II THE PLAY OF THE that the crusaders carried the theme to the Holy Land: it is not necessary to believe that they brought it back, but certainly they found it there installed. The Wise Sibyl figures after the pro- phets, in the Guide to Painting that Didron found on Mount Athos, and in company with Balaam, at the end of a line of philoso- phers of Greece who have spoken of the Incarnation of Christ: these are, to wit, Apollonius, Solon, Thucydides, Plutarch, Plato, Aristotle, Philo, Sophocles, Thoulis king of Egypt, the divine Balaam, and the Wise Sibyl. Her scroll speaks of the Judge : "There will come from heaven an eternal king, who will judge all flesh and all the universe. From a virgin, a spotless bride, the only son of God should come: eternal, unfathomable, the only Word of God. It makes the heaven shake and the human soul tremble." 52 The earliest known appearance of the sibyl in painting is at S. Angelo in Formis, in late eleventh-century frescoes. She fills the farthest spandrel of the nave arcade on the north side. David and Solomon BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 39 follow, and other prophets. Her scroll bears the familiar Judicii signo. ... In the twelfth her image was set by Solo- mon's, on the Baptistery at Parma. This is no place for divagation on the sibyls in Renaissance art; 53 how Fra Angelico is said to have painted one in S. Marco, and Ghirlandajo has one in SS. Trinita: and Andrea del Castagno in his Cumaean Sibyl forestalled Michelangelo: how the last, with Raphael and Pintur- richio, all evoked more or fewer on Roman ceilings in the sixteenth century, and at Spello, and at Tivoli, had set them — so they had been arrayed in the fifteenth in fresco at Amiens, and at Avignon in the fourteenth, and on panel by Herman torn Ring at Augsburg, and at Ulm by Jorg Syrlin. There, in what is perhaps the most beautiful plastic work of the German Renaissance, nine noble sibyls on the choir- stalls on one side correspond, not to pro- phets as in the windows at Auch, but to the great minds, figures of the antique genius, Ptolemy, Terence, Cicero and the rest. Attavante degli Attavanti set six Including the Borgia apartments Finer than Simone Fiorenti- no's at Rimini in the Tempio Malates- tirio AND MONOGRAPHS II 40 The Sibyl and the Emperor THE PLAY OF THE So Cavazzola's mouldering in a Veronese bye-street Queens' welcomes sibyls around the title-page of Matthias Corvinus' breviary. The theme of the Tiburtine sibyl and the Emperor is as dear to northern painters as it was persistent in northern Mysteries : it served Roger van der Weyden, Dirck Bouts and Memling, as it served the illuminators of the Very Rich Hours and the Grimani Breviary. The finest treat- ment, however, is that of Baldassare Peruzzi in the church of Fontegiusta at vSiena, whose long-necked prophetess, like a disguised princess, still reigns, through ruin and restoration, from the crumbling wall. Curiously enough, the church has a Spanish association: the dusty whale bone's over the door are said to have been offered by Christopher Columbus. As for the little sibyls among the innumerable figures of the Capilla Dorada, in Salamanca New Cathedral, they testify to nothing but the insatiable learning and indifferent skill of some fifteenth-century sculptor. 54 The drama revives into a sort of after- glow, secular in all but name. A Mystery of Sibyls was played before Anne of Brit- II BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 41 tany when she entered Tours in 1491 ; 55 there would be a satisfaction in comparing it with those played before Queen Mar- garet in Coventry and Queen Lianor in Portugal. So, the first figures who met Queen Elizabeth in the pageant at Kenil- worth (1575) were the ten sibyls. It is not possible to discuss the history of the sibyls in literature, 56 excepting to in- dicate the traditions that lay to hand when Gil Vicente sat down to write his Mystery. The Erythraean sibyl was the eldest, and she lived in a cave: wandering over the earth she came to Delphi, and there Apollo, apparently, disputed the seat with her and worsted her. A faint folk-lore memory of this conflict with Apollo, and of the old wrong, lives on in the occasional appearance of Cassandra as a sibyl. 57 "In the popular consciousness Sibylla remains a prophetess of sad truths, pregnant with ill, as she remained to the end of the Middle Age." One Lycophron of Chalkis, a wit- less poet of the end of the third century, composed a tragic scene in which Alex- andra (that is, Cassandra) rehearses all the The sibyl in literature The struggle with Apollo Cassandra a sibyl AND MONOGRAPHS 11 42 THE PLAY OF THE The Dream of the Hundred Suns misery that shall come to Troy and to Greeks after they have taken Ilium. The Christian sibyl had appeared in the Shepherd of Hermas, Lactantius and even Eusebius giving her a place. To the yearning mysticism of these centuries she is congenial, and the Erythraean sibyl is re- vived in a long epigram under the An- tonine emperors. Plenty of sibylline ma- terial existed at Byzance, and Liutprand of Cremona stumbled over some of it. To a Greek original must be referred the Roumanian tale of the Dream of the Hun- dred Suns and the Slavonic version on which it rests. 58 The sibyl is the daughter of David, by rather a gross device of pure folk-tale, born without mother from an egg laid by a goose: this makes her, as in some Italian folk-lore, the sister of Solo- mon. She grew up mighty and wise and came to be ruler of Rome and she hoped that from her Christ should be born and kept her virginity for fifty years, till a hundred of her great Boyars saw a dream and then Sevilla knew that that would not come to pass, which she had hoped. She II BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 43 explained the nine suns rising, as successive invasions of the land. The reader will perceive that this is the figure of Gil Vicente, whom he called Cas- sandra for her sorrows, and that it corre- sponds at least in part with the legend of the Tiburtine sibyl in the west, for which Bede is held responsible. In truth the spurious treatise attributed to the Venerable Bede includes the Hundred Suns in its narrative and Cassandra in its enumeration. The three essential points in the familiar story of Cassandra are (1) she foresaw, (2) her love affair was with a god and not a mortal, (3) she prized her virginity above all. There is in the critical speech a direct suggestion, no more, that Gil Vicente was not unmindful of these: the shepherdess passes from the disinclination to take a mutable man for a husband to the proposition that God is not mutable: then rapidly to her deter- mination to be the Virgin from whom Christ is to be born. It is quite possible that Gil Vicente, being a humanist of European standing, and Bede 1 i Gil Vicente a humanist AND MONOGRAPHS '. — II _ 44 THE PLAY OF THE In contact with the soil II known in Leyden and read by Erasmus (who learned Spanish for the purpose), should have come upon this legend in learned literature. He knew, of course, Lactantius, Isidore of Seville, and perhaps the venerable Bede; he probably knew the book of Filippo Barbieri from which the artists drew, for the prophecies of his sibyls correspond roughly to that text. It is also possible that he got it through the people. This Spanish drama is always in contact with homely earth. Du Meril pointed out long ago 59 that "quoique Jean de la Encina fut maitre de chapelle de Leon X, et que ses pieces aient ete representees pour la premiere fois dans le palais du due d'Alva, son Egloga de la Noche de Navidad appartenait certaine- ment a la litterature populaire de son temps." The dialect employed by his shepherds and those of Lucas Fernandez is regional and faithful. Gil Vicente, even if the dialogue against matrimony is to be referred to a French source, was emulating rather than imitating: the theme is com- mon to human experience, and he need not BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 45 have lost touch with reality. One or two details suggest that this is the case. The proud sibyl is a figure in Italian lore. 90 She lives on, immured for her pride in a mountain near Norcia, and there must stay until the Day of Doom. Various have visited her, and stayed for a year and a day, and come back to tell of the marvels of the hollow hill. The story becomes at times a variant of the Tannhauser motive, and again of that of S. Patrick's Purgatory. Her pride is punished: Mary's humility is rewarded. In Sicilian folk-lore she is sometimes Solomon's sister and sometimes identified with the Queen of Sheba. "In the province of Girgenti she is a Cas- sandra," writes Ferdinando Neri, appar- ently unaware that she has ever borne that name: the devil wanted to prohibit the maga Sibylla from prophesying, and when God interfered he took away her beauty and allowed her only to prophesy ill. Now if Sicily looks on one hand, to Byzance, on the other hand it looks to Spain, and one of the villages where this tale is told is called Aragona. The cur- The proud sibyl in Sicily AND MONOGRAPHS II 46 THE PLAY OF THE Conclusion II rent may well have set from the Peninsula eastward. The figure of the proud sibyl herself, "in the deception of her sterile and superb purity," is the last incarnation of a long sequence, but there is no solution of continuity. It has been shown, then, that Gil Vicente was using recognized material, without fantasticality or anachronism, and that he stayed in contact with the soil, with the popular and living drama: and further- more, that as the plastic and vivid images, so to speak, of the Mysteries, determined the art of three centuries at times, so here, by an inverse process, the rich and stately figures of prophets and sibyls, familiar in art and unmistakable, determined at a moment in its development the masque or courtly interlude. BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA NOTES The Auto de la Sibila Casandra was pub- lished in Teatro Espanol anterior a Lope de Vega, by J. N. Bohl de Faber, at Hamburg in 1832: again at Hamburg in 1834 in Obras de Gil Vicente correctas e emendadas pelo cuidado e diligencia de J. V. Barreto Feio, e J. G. Monteiro. The three volumes of this edition contain only a part of the poet's work. A full bibliography will be found in Aubrey Bell, Four Plays of Gil Vicente, Cambridge, University Press, 1920. 1 Bohl de Faber, p. 56. 2 January 6th, 1336: E. Male, Le Renouvelle- ment de V Art par les Mysteres, Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1907. 3 Merimee: V Art Dramatique a Valencia, Bibliotheque Meridionale, XVI: pp. 9-33. 4 More precisely, "Casandra pastora, Sala- mon pastor: Erutea, Peresica, e Cimeria, tias de Casandra, e Esaias, Mosen, Abrahan, tios de Casandra." 5 Published in the Quarterly Review, Decem- ber 1846, p. 179; Ancient Portuguese Drama. 6 For these two versions the writer is account- able: the text is in Bohl de Faber, pp. 64, 65. 7 Canete, Teatro Completo de Juan del Encina, p. 3. AND MONOGRAPHS 47 Incomplete account of unsatisfac- tory editions II 48 Garcia de Resende II THE PLAY OF THE 8 E vimos singularmente Fazer representacoens D'estilo mui eloquente De mui novas invencoens, E feitas por Gil Vicente. Elle foi que inventou Isto ca, e o usou Com mais graca e mais doutrina; Posto que Joam del Enzina O Pastoril comecou. 9 Historia do Theatro Portuguez, 1870: vol. I, Vida de Gil Vicente e su escuela, seculo XVI: p. 63. 10 The dictionary of the Spanish Academy- defines chacota as rude merrymaking or rustic mirth: it certainly seems here to stand for dancing of some sort, and is recognized by musicians as the name of a dance. "Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1906, pp. 88-94. Cf. also Michel, Histoire de VArt, IV, ii, 808. 12 Sepet, Les Prophetes du Christ, p. 44. 13 D'Ancona, Origini del Teatro Italiano, I, 315. "Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1904, Le Renou- vellement de Vart par les Mysteres, p. 299. 15 The authority is R. Hobart Cust, The Pavement Masters of Siena: London, 1 90 1 . 16 Canete: Farsas y Eglogas al modo pastoril y castellano fechas por Lucas Fernandez, Sal- mantino. Prologue, p. lxxviii, note. 17 Op. cit. pp. 3-8 : also Migne, Patr. Lat. XLII, 1123. BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 18 Viaje Literarict', I, 134, XIX, 96, XXII, 131, 133, 183. / "Romania, 1880, p. 355, El Canto de la Sibylla: ibid, p. 154, note 2; Trend, The Dance of the Seises, in Music and Letters, January, 1921, p. 37. 20 Les Origines Latines dn Thedtre Moderne, pp. 179 seqq. 21 Du Cange, Glossarium III, 255. 22 Du Meril, op. cit. pp. 147, 151. 23 At Rouen, on the Feast of the Ass the ceremony ended with everyone going up on the roodscreen while the Cantor gave out the introit. Du Cange, op. et he. cit. 24 Du Meril, op. cit. pp. 153 seqq. 25 Coussemaker {La Drame Liturgique du Moyen Age, Paris, 1861), published words and music. For the exact parallel with the sermon, v. Sepet, pp. 15-26. 26 Op. cit. p. 180, note. 27 Du Meril, op. cit. p. 181, note. 28 These are the opening lines of the famous acrostic poem, quoted in the Augustinian ser- mon. Du Meril cites a Paris MS. of the ninth century (B.N. 2832) in which the lines are accompanied by musical notes. Op. cit. p. 187. From the fifth century, he says, the verses attributed to the Erythraean sibyl were recited in the churches; and at Paris, at S. Martial de Limoges, at Narbonne, and in a good many other churches of France, they continued to be a part of the liturgy for a long while: p. 1 85, note. AND MONOGRAPHS 49 The East Coast and the Isles II 50 Play in church Early tradition II THE PLAY OF THE 29 Du Meril, pp. 187 sqq. The piece does not however end here, but proceeds, after S. Augustine has intoned the opening lines of the sermon, to rehearse the Annunciation and Visitation, a complete play of the Three Kings, a Shepherds' play and Massacre of the Inno- cents, the Flight into Egypt, which seems to have taken the form of a procession around the church, and in the nave the Fall of the Idols in Egypt. The centuries are bringing their changes. 30 Leon Palustre, Adam, Mystere du XII me siecle, Paris, 1877. 31 D'Ancona, op. cit. I, 315. This is, I think, the MS. once in the Ashburnham collection and now in the Laurentian library: it has been printed (Turin, 1888) but is hard to get a sight of. 32 Discordantiae nonnullae inter sanctum Hieronymum et Augustinum; Male, L 'Art Religieux & la fin du Moyen Age, pp. 272-277. M. Male, who quotes the important passage in full, quotes also in a note the original editor's statement that it was very famous already (p. 273, note 1) and recognizes that bits of the stuff had long been floating about Italy, citing himself the text on a scroll of Giovanni Pisano's sibyl at Siena (p. 277, note 3). It might be added that the sibyls of the Pisani on the pulpit there correspond fairly in the attributes to Barbieri's text: the date of these being 1266-1268. 33 D'Ancona, Sacre Rappresentazioni secoli X VI, X V, e X VI, I, 1 67- 1 8 1 . dei BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 34 Ibid., p. 202. 35 D'Ancona, Origini del Teatro Italiano, I, 334. 36 Ibid., 348. For the ambo, v. Bertaux, V Art dans Vltalie Meridionale, p. 602. 37 D. Ancona, op. cit. I, 335. 38 Mystere du Vieil Testament, VI, 181, 229: Societe des Anciens Textes Francais, 1891, 3. By the way, the two companions of the sibyl that M. Male postulated on the evidence of painting, actually figure here, and are named Tibulle Tiburtin and Evagius Tiburtin (pp. 196-206), as he has doubtless long since recalled. 39 Male, op. cit. 215-6; Du Meril, op. cit. 185-6; Male, op. cit. 280 seqq. especially p. 289. 40 A. Graf, Roma nella Memoria e nella imaginazione del medio evo, chapter IX (pp. 243-2 6 1 ) , p . 2 5 5 . N.B., Graf has not apparently heard of the proud sibyl. 41 Cursor Mundi, Early English Text Society, original series, vols. LXII and CXV, 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101: lines 6999, 7019, 7030, 8889, 9169. 42 Cf . Jane Harrison, Prolegomena, Themis, passim. 43 Early English Text Society, extra series, LXXI, 61-63. 44 Early English Text Society, extra series, LXII and CXV, 129. 45 Monmerque and Francisque Michel, The- dtre Francais du Moyen Age, Paris, 1839: p. 1*. The women ask the angel for Christ, the angel AND MONOGRAPHS 51 Italian Mysteries Two companions II 52 Easter play Autos Sacramen- tales II THE PLAY OF THE sends them into Galilee to look for him, and forth steps Christ — "Sponsus: Adest Sponsus qui est Christus, Vigilate virgines." In Du Meril's editing (op. cit. p. 233) this is not apparent. The Munich Nativity (Du Meril, 187-213) illustrates this dovetailing of suc- cessive plays, but it shows at least that they were played in succession. 46 Early English Text Society, extra series LXXXVII, Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays: pp. 109-118: "Pageants on special occasions, extracts from the Coventry Leet Book." 47 Rivadeneyra, Comedias de Calderon de la Barca, IV, pp. 193-212. It may be apposite to quote an illuminating remark of J. B. Trend from the current number of Music and Letters (January, 1921): 'An auto sacramental was of course an opera, the essential thing about it being that it was an expression — a musical and plastic expression and after that a poetical one — of the mystery. . . . The reason why even the best autos are almost unreadable nowadays is that the words are only the libretto." The Dance of the Seises at Seville, p. 20. 48 Male, VArt Religieux du XIII me siecle France, p. 380. M. Male thinks this head will be David's. I take it for Augustus. 49 The documents are in Sanpere y Miquel, Los Trecentistas Catalanes, p. 253. 60 Bertaux, op. et loc. cit. Marcel Reymond, La Sculpture Florentine, I, 81, 96, 131 seqq. especially 141-3: Langton Douglas, Siena, 303- BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA 309. For the Sienese workmen in France, see De Mely, Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1896, XX, p. 375. On the campanile at Florence (1337- 1360) with David and Solomon stand the Ti- burtine and Erythraean sibyls: Reymond, op. cit. I, 128. For the custodia of Ouenca cf. Cean Bermudez, Diccionario, I, 118, s. v. Becerril. 81 Male, La Part de Suger dans la Creation de V Iconographie du Moyen Age; Revue de l'Art Ancien et Moderne, 1914, 256 seqq: L'Art Religieux du XIII mQ Steele, 383 and note. 52 Didron, Christian Iconography, II, 298. Kraus, S. Angelo in Formis, Jahrb. der Preuss. Kunsts., 1893, pp. 84, 86: plate p. 18. Ben- edetto, A Kingsley Porter, Lombard Architec- ture, II, 231, plate 165. 63 Fra Angelico I cannot verify, and I doubt: Ghirlandajo set the Tiburtine sibyl over the arch of the Sassetti chapel : Andrea del Castagno's is now in the room at S. Appollonia Michelangelo's in the Sistine chapel possibly owe a debt hitherto unacknowledged to those of the pulpits of the Pisani at Pisa, Pistoja, and Siena: Raphael's are in S. Maria della Pace: Pinturicchio's in S. Maria del Popolo and the Collegiata at Spello: M. Male adds {V Art Religieux de la Fin du Moyen Age, 277) the church at Tivoli, which I have not seen, and S. Pietro in Montorio and S. Maria Mag- giore, which I cannot recall. He is certainly in error in crediting Pollajuolo with any. He says also (p. 270) that there was an altar at Aracoeli of the XHth century carved with the Sibyl and the Emperor, citing Muratpri, AND MONOGRAPHS 53 Sculpture Situation II I 54 Siena and sibyls Chaumont II THE PLAY OF THE Antiq, ital. Ill, 880. For Amiens, Du Meril, op. cit. 185, note 2; Avignon, Okey, The Story of Avignon, p. 315. The Augsburg sibyls are preserved on scattered panels in the Museum ; those at Ulm have been beautifully photo- graphed. The frontispiece of Attavante is reproduced in Miintz, La Renaissance au Temps de Charles VIII, p. 384. Siena had in some way a special devotion to the sibyls : one Sixtus of Siena is quoted as an authority on the subject, and the list of monu- ments already cited here covers all the centu- ries and all the arts. Curiously, the frescoes in the sibyls' room at the Vatican are said to show traces of a Sienese hand, as the sculpture on the prophets' buttress at Orvieto certainly shows it. 54 For the Sibyls in Northern France there is little to add to the admirable account of M. Male, L' Art Religieux du XIII me Siecle, 380; V Art Religieux a la Fin du Moyen Age, 280 sqq. The date of the windows at Auch is 1507-1513. 55 Du Meril, op. cit. 185: he says that the sibyls had a special theatre of their own at Chaumont, where their prophecies were repre- sented ; and that Simon Vostre's version of the Dit des Douze Sibylles was once at least arranged for representation for "Henriette princess d'Angouleme mere du rey Francais." 66 Many sources are given in Male. The sermon attributed to S. Augustine is accessible in Sepet, Les Prophetes du Christ, pp. 3-8; Isidore of Seville does not name ten sibyls, but I think the pseudo-Bede does, and tells BRYN MAWR NOTES SIBYL CASSANDRA of a dream of Nine Suns, which are the Ages of the World : moreover, he includes Cassandra explicitly. An admirable account, without bibliography, is Johannes Geffcken, in Preussiche Juhrbucher, 1901, pp. 193-214. To this I am indebted for a hint on the sig- nificance of the struggle between Apollo and Cassandra, and on it I have drawn freely in this paragraph. 57 Balthasar Porreflo wrote in Spain in 1621, "Besides these twelve already stated there are others mentioned, such as Mantho, Daphne daughter of Tiresias . . . Cassandra, Xeno- clea, Melisa and Lampusa, and Strabo in his Geography mentions many others"; in the matter of false sibyls he cites Juan de Horosco and Covarrubias: Oraculas de las doce Sibilas, profetisas de Christo. Porrefio I know, but not this book; it is not in Gayangos' Ensayo de una Biblioteca, and I take the citation from a work entertaining if uncritical, by Mariana Monteira, As David and the Sibyls Say, pp. 82, 87, 88. 68 M. Gaster, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1910, p. 614-8. 69 Op. cit. p. 188 note. 60 Gaston Paris, Legendes du Moyen Age, pp. 67-109, Le Paradis de la Reine Sibylle. Ferdinando Neri, Le Tradizioni Italiani della Sibilla, in Studii Mediaevali, IV, 213, seqq. Pitre' is the ultimate source for Sicily. AND MONOGRAPHS 55 Porrefio Cassandra II 4 Printed for BRYN MAWR COLLEGE BY THE John C. Winston Co. PHILADELPHIA, PA. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. RECD LD KP^SOkE JS^ In 6Dec g eiJ^ ■■■ i 13 i LD 21A-50m-4,'59 (A1724sl0)476B 22Apr'64LM tack: 8i ***>., 0*^* % Sp. 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