Christian drama was born inside the liturgy. The tenth-century Easter ceremony known from its opening words as the Quem quaeritis, whom do you seek, staged the angel's question to the women at the tomb with two groups of singing clergy, and from that seed grew a whole literature of liturgical plays. As the drama moved out of the choir into the churchyard and the market square, it changed language and scale: by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the towns of Europe were mounting vernacular passion and cycle plays lasting days, financed by guilds, with hundreds of performers, elaborate machinery for heaven and hell, and scripts that survive in great compilations from France, Germany and England.
The passion sequence, from the entry into Jerusalem through the crucifixion to the resurrection, was the emotional centre, designed to move spectators to compassion and penitence in line with the affective piety of the age. The Reformation broke the tradition in Protestant lands, and Catholic authorities of the Enlightenment era, distrusting popular spectacle, suppressed much of what remained; Bavaria banned passion plays in 1770 and Oberammergau had to petition for exemption. What survived did so where community ownership was strongest, in the Alpine villages, in Spain and its colonies, and in forms as varied as the Via Crucis processions of Latin America and the sung Pabasa of the Philippines, all descendants of the medieval instinct that the central story of the faith should be seen, wept over and walked through, not only heard.