'Speak firmly and in an orderly rhythm.' 'Make appropriate gestures … manifesting sorrow by falling down on the ground … or showing joy through the face.' These were the instructions given to people playing the first man and woman in the biblical Jeu d'Adam (late twelfth century). Talking in another voice and mimicking another person were the key body languages to master, the skills necessary to acting before others. They defined a practice that did not correspond to any formal conception of genre and extended far beyond what we recognize as theatre today. In a world where culture was transacted orally as much as through hand-written texts or manuscripts and the earliest printed books, such theatrical action informed the way texts were read aloud, the styles of celebrating religious and political occasions, as well as physical play, noise-making. As Paul Zumthor began to argue in the late 1960s, such action animated so many different forms of communication and expression that it is more telling to ask what was not characterized theatrically than to identify what was theatre.

The Parisian schoolman, Hugh of St Victor (died 1141) captured this array of activity when he described in a Latin treatise the 'science called theatrics'. 'Epics were presented either by recitals or by acting out dramatic roles or using masks or puppets; choral processions and dances were held in the porches. In gymnasia, they wrestled, at banquets they made music with songs and instruments. In the temples they sang the praises of God.' Hugh adapted a model that had come from imperial Rome to describe the rituals, sports, and verbal fictions of public life in twelfth-century Europe. He gives us a sense of the many different sites for theatrical action, and the people implicated.