Zpěv a mluvené slovo, latina a lidový jazyk ve středověkých velikonočních hrách ze střední Evropy

Central European theatre forms a distinctive, in many respects original, branch of medieval religious theatre. Tradition of the Easter festival (Osterfeiern), a prototheatrical liturgical form, that stood at the beginning of the whole medieval theatre tradition, evolved more richly than elsewhere. In central Europe, they gave birth to the dramatic genre of the Easter play, whose main characteristics is duality (Jarmila Veltruská's term), both formal and contentual. On the formal level, the duality came from the fact that the original elements that held qualities of liturgy (Latin + singing), were joined by a new layer, often using contrary expressive means (national language, e.g. German or Czech + spoken word). An instructive examples of passages built on the principle of duality are so-called "strophic systems", chains of two to four rhymed strophes, that came into existence by multiplying the original strophe (sung in Latin) with one or more strophes of the same content, that however changed means of expression. Their primary purpose was not to mediate comprehension but to open the semantic interplay with tension between two poles, the hieratic one (embodied mainly by Latin and singing, associated with liturgy) and affective (mediated particularly by vernacular language and declamation, closer to everyday life) – this is proved especially by triplicate systems, where the strophe in vernacular language, sung (with the same melody) and spoken (so-called ricmus), alternatively a peculiar type of duplicate systems, documented in Germans plays only, which suppresses the original Latin strophe and retains only the two vernacular strophes.