Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/17

gradually, but it cannot have been long before individual voices took the responsive parts, or before individual singers detached themselves from the choir and enabled some sort of primitive drama. By the third quarter of the tenth century this drama had, even in England, become something more than primitive. One performer seats himself by a prepared sepulchre, three others, making as though in search of something, approach him. The dialogue is then chanted. The three pass on the tidings to the full choir. Then the one at the sepulchre invites the three to come and see for themselves. They lift the cloths out of the empty grave and display them before the face of the people. Further elaboration both of theatrical business and of text was inevitable and readily followed, but the greater the complexity of the drama enafcted, the less suitable it became as an incident in the office of the Mass. In the English use just described it has already found a more fitting position immediately before the 'Te Deum' in the third nocturn at matins on Easter morning, and this appears to have become its regular though not invariable place. It has also attached itself to the widespread ceremony of the Easter sepulchre. On Good Friday a cross or crucifix was solemnly laid in a prepared tomb, sometimes part of the high altar, sometimes a separate shrine, where it remained till early on Easter morning, when, either secretly or with ceremony, it was taken from the sepulchre again and set up in a convenient place. There were the cloths in which this, and sometimes a reserved Host as well, had been wrapped, that the