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Đorđe Slavnić

PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA:

ROME, MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

International Center for Cultural Studies,

Sarajevo – Amherst,

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2011

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Đorđe Slavnić

PRE - SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA:

ROME, MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

International Center for Cultural Studies,

Sarajevo – Amherst,

2011

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Uvodna riječ

Ova skromna studija nastala je kao potreba ali i posljedica kursa Prešekspirijanska

drama koji sam godinama držao na Pedagoškom fakultetu u Bihaću. Iako je danas

teško reći da literature o o tom pitanju nema i da više nije dostupna što u

knjižarama što na elektronskim medijima, studenti ipak preferiraju da dobiju nešto

„konkretno“ i na papiru iz čega bi mogli pripremati ispit i dobiti brz uvid u

suštinska pitanja koja gradivo obrađuje bez suvišnog upuštanja u širinu i dubinu

materije. Iz tih razloga pristao sam da napravim ovu studiju s nadom da će

poslužiti onima kojima je namijenjena.

S druge strane Šekspirovi korijeni su duboki, preduboki. Njegova tragedija vuče

korijene ne samo iz Senekine nego još dalje iz grčke, jer prva i najveća tragedija

osvete je antički grčki Orest. U tom smislu Hamlet je preko Kida daleki Orestov

potomak kao što je i Falstaf utekao iz neke menandrovsko – plautovske ujdurme.

Srednjevjekovne farse i bufonerije te kasnije „ozbiljnije“ renesansne komedije bili

su samo vjesnici „Labuda iz Stratforda“ kome bi vjerovatno dobro potkresao krila

jedan drugi genije elizabetanskog doba, samo da je doživio tridesetu – Kristofer

Marlo. On je po genijalnosti ako ne nadmašivao Šekspira onda mu je bar bio

pandan ali uz to izuzetno obrazovan pandan. Zamislimo samo kakva bi djela pisao

obrazovani Šekspir kada je samo sa osnovnom školom pisao omako kako je pisao.

Dakle, evo kratkog pokušaja da se nađu i prepoznaju Šekspirovi korijeni. To je

lako, jer se tragovi vide svuda a Ejvonski gusar harao je svim vodama toga

vremena, od Seneke, preko Holinšeda pa do savremenika kojima je bezočno „krao“

zaplete drama i likove. Ali o tog materijala pravio je genijalne drame pa mu se zato

mora oprostiti.

Sarajevo, 2011. Đ.S.

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INTRODUCTION

As the Western Roman Empire fell into decay through the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., the seat of Roman power shifted to Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, today called the Byzantine Empire. While surviving evidence about Byzantine theatre is slight, existing records show that  mime, pantomime, scenes or recitations from tragedies and comedies, dances, and other entertainments were very popular. Constantinople had two theatres that were in use as late as the 5th century A.D. However, the true importance of the Byzantines in theatrical history is their preservation of many classical Greek texts and the compilation of a massive encyclopedia called the Suda, from which is derived a large amount contemporary information on Greek theatre. [1] In the 6th century, the Emporer Justinian finally closed down all theatres for good.

According to the binary thinking of the Church's early followers, everything that did not belong to Godbelonged to the Devil; thus all non-Christian gods and religions were satanic. Efforts were made in many countries through this period to not only convert Jews, pagans and Muslims but to destroy pre-Christian institutions and influences. Works of Greek and Roman literature were burnt, the thousand-year-old Platonic Academy was closed, the Olympic games were banned and all theatres were shut down. The theatre itself was viewed as a diabolical threat to Christianity because of its continued popularity in Rome even among new converts. Church fathers such as Tatian, Tertullian andAugustine characterized the stage as instruments in the devil's fiendish plot to corrupt men's souls, while acting was considered sinful because of it's cruel mockery of God's creation.

Under these influences, the Church set about trying to suppress theatrical spectacles by passing laws prohibiting and excluding Roman actors. They were forbidden to have contact with Christian women, own slaves, or wear gold. They were officially excommunicated, denied the sacraments, including marriage and burial, and were defamed and debased throughout Europe. For many centuries thereafter, clerics were cautioned to not allow these suddenly homeless, travelling actors to perform in their jurisdictions. 

From the 5th century, Western Europe was plunged into a period of general disorder that lasted (with a brief period of stability under theCarolingian Empire in the 9th century) until the 10th century A.D. As such, most organized theatrical activities disappeared in Western Europe. While it seems that small nomadic bands traveled around Europe throughout the period, performing wherever they could find an audience, there is no evidence that they produced anything but crude scenes.

Early Medieval Period

Faced with the problem of explaining a new religion to a largely illiterate population, churches in the early Middle Ages began staging dramatized versions of particular biblical events on specific days of the year. These dramatizations were included in order to vivify annual celebrations.  Symbolic objects and actions - vestments, altars, censers, and pantomime performed by priests - recalled the events which Christian ritual celebrates. These were extensive sets of visual signs that could be used to communicate with a largely illiterate audience. These performances developed into liturgical dramas, the earliest of which

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is the Whom do you Seek (Quem-Quaeritis) Easter trope, dating from ca. 925. Liturgical drama was sung responsively by two groups and did not involve actors impersonating characters. However, sometime between 965 and 975, Æthelwold of Winchester composed the Regularis Concordia (Monastic Agreement) which contains a playlet complete with directions for performance.

Hrosvitha (c.935-973), an aristocratic canoness and historian in northern Germany, wrote six plays modeled on Terence's comedies but using religious subjects in the 10th century A.D. Terence's comedies had long been used in monastery schools as examples of spoken Latin but are full of clever, alluring courtesans and ordinary human pursuits such as sex, love and marriage. In order to preempt criticism from the Church, Hrosvitha prefaced her collection by stating that her moral purpose to save Christians from the guilt they must feel when reading Classical literature. Her declared solution was to imitate the "laudable" deeds of women in Terence's plays and discard the "shameless" ones.[7] These six plays are the first known plays composed by a female dramatist and the first identifiable Western dramatic works of the post-classical era.[6] They were first published in 1501 and had considerable influence on religious and didactic plays of the sixteenth century. Hrosvitha was followed by Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), a Benedictine abbess, who wrote a Latin musical drama called Ordo Virtutum in 1155.

The anonymous pagan play "Querolus", written c.420, was adapted in the 12th century by Vitalis of Blois. Other secular Latin plays were also written in the 12th century, mainly in France but also in England ("Babio"). There certainly existed some other performances that were not fully fledged theatre; they may have been carryovers from the original pagan cultures (as is known from records written by the clergy disapproving of such festivals). It is also known that mimes, minstrels, bards, storytellers, and jugglers traveled in search of new audiences and financial support. Not much is known about these performers' repertoire and few written texts survive. One of the most famous of the secular plays is the musical "Le Jeu de Robin et Marion", written by Adam de la Halle in the 13th century, which is fully laid out in the original manuscript with lines, musical notation, and illuminations in the margins depicting the actors in motion. Adam also wrote another secular play, "Jeu de la Fueillee" inArras, a French town in which theatre was thriving in the late 12th and 13th centuries. Perhaps the finest play surviving from Arras, is the "Jeu de saint Nicolas" by Jean Bodel (c.1200).

High and Late Medieval Theatre

As the Viking invasions ceased in the middle of the 11th century A.D., liturgical dramahad spread from Russia to Scandinavia to Italy. Only in Muslim-occupied Spain were liturgical dramas not presented at all. Despite the large number of liturgical dramas that have survived from the period, many churches would have only performed one or two per year and a larger number never performed any at all. 

The Feast of Fools was especially important in the development of comedy. The festival inverted the status of the lesser clergy and allowed them to ridicule their superiors and the routine of church life. Sometimes plays were staged as part of the occasion and a certain amount of burlesque and comedy crept into these performances. Although comic episodes had to truly wait until the separation of drama from the liturgy, the Feast of Fools undoubtedly had a profound effect on the development of comedy in both religious and secular plays. 

Performance of religious plays outside of the church began sometime in the 12th century through a traditionally accepted process of merging shorter liturgical dramas into longer plays

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which were then translated into vernacular and performed by laymen and thus accessible to a wider segment of society inclusive of the working class. The use of vernacular enabled drama to be understood and enjoyed by a larger audience.The Mystery of Adam (1150) gives credence to this theory as its detailed stage direction suggest that it was staged outdoors. A number of other plays from the period survive, including La Seinte Resurrection (Norman), The Play of the Magi Kings(Spanish), and Sponsus (French).

The importance of the High Middle Ages in the development of theatre was theeconomic and political changes that led to the formation of guilds and the growth of towns. This would lead to significant changes in the Late Middle Ages. In the British Isles, plays were produced in some 127 different towns during the Middle Ages. These vernacular Mystery playswere written in cycles of a large number of plays: York (48 plays), Chester (24), Wakefield (32) and Unknown (42). A larger number of plays survive from France and Germany in this period and some type of religious dramas were performed in nearly every European country in the Late Middle Ages. Many of these plays contained comedy, devils, villains and clowns.

The majority of actors in these plays were drawn from the local population. For example, at Valenciennes in 1547, more than 100 roles were assigned to 72 actors. Plays were staged on pageant wagon stages, which were platforms mounted on wheels used to move scenery. Often providing their own costumes, amateur performers in England were exclusively male, but other countries had female performers. The platform stage, which was an unidentified space and not a specific locale, allowed for abrupt changes in location.

Henry VIII of England loved courtmasques

Morality plays emerged as a distinct dramatic form around 1400 and flourished until 1550. The most interesting morality play is The Castle of Perseverance which depicts mankind's progress from birth to death. However, the most famous morality play and perhaps best known medieval drama is Everyman. Everyman receives Death's summons, struggles to escape and finally resigns himself to necessity. Along the way, he is deserted by Kindred, Goods, and Fellowship - only Good Deedsgoes with him to the grave.

There were also a number of secular performances staged in the Middle Ages, the earliest of which isThe Play of the Greenwood by Adam de la Halle in 1276. It contains satirical scenes and folkmaterial such as faeries and other supernatural occurrences. Farces also rose dramatically in popularity after the 13th century. The majority of these plays come from France and Germany and are similar in tone and form, emphasizing sex and bodily excretions. The best known playwright of farces is Hans Sachs (1494-1576) who wrote 198 dramatic works. In England, the The Second Shepherds' Play of the Wakefield Cycle is the best known early farce. However, farce did not appear independently in England until the 16th century with the work of John Heywood (1497-1580).

A significant forerunner of the development of Elizabethan drama was the Chambers of Rhetoric in theLow Countries. These societies were concerned with poetry, music and drama and held contests to see which society could compose the best drama in relation to a question posed.

At the end of the Late Middle Ages, professional actors began to appear in England and Europe. Richard III and Henry VII both maintained small companies of professional actors. Their plays were performed in the Great Hall of a nobleman's residence, often with a raised platform at one end for the audience and a "screen" at the other for the actors. Also important were Mummers' plays, performed during the Christmas season, and

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court masques. These masques were especially popular during the reign of Henry VIII who had a House of Revels built and an Office of Revels established in 1545.

Staging

Depending on the area of the performances, the plays were performed in the middle of the street, onpageant wagons in the streets of great cities (this was inconvenient for the actors because the small stage size made stage movement impossible), in the halls of nobility, or in the round in amphitheatres, as suggested by current archaeology in Cornwall and the southwest of England. All medieval stage production was temporary and expected to be removed upon the completion of the performances. Actors, predominantly male, typically wore long, dark robes. Medieval plays such as the Wakefield cycle, or the Digby Magdalene featured lively interplay between two distinct areas, the wider spaces in front of the raised staging areas, and the elevated areas themselves (called, respectively, the locus and the platea). Typically too, actors would move between these locations in order to suggest scene changes, rather than remain stationary and have the scene change around them as is typically done in modern theater.

The dramas remained religious but were no longer strictly liturgical; therefore, they were not exclusively performed in the church or before the gates of the church. When staging later Medieval theatre, it was important to have spectacle and present a realistic depiction of the play so the audience members would see and feel the characters whom religious traditions may have not fully presented. Although the main key to having widespread knowledge of the plays was the vernacular language they were performed in, the spectacle of action, props, costumes and stage direction enhanced the production and its interpretation by the audience. Thus, scenery, stage machinery and costumes enabled a more realistic depiction of the message the play was trying to promote. Whether on a fixed stage, with more opportunity for spectacle, or on a pageant wagon that moved through the streets, the ornate details and tricks attributed to these productions enhanced the audience’s experience of the play.

Decline and Change

Its death was due mostly to changing political and economic factors. First, the Protestant Reformation targeted the theatre, especially in England, in an effort to stamp out allegiance to Rome. In Wakefield, for example, the local mystery cycle text shows signs of Protestant editing, with references to the pope crossed out and two plays completely eliminated because they were too Catholic. However, it was not just the Protestants who attacked the theatre of the time. The Council of Trent banned religious plays in an attempt to rein in the extrabiblical material that the Protestants frequently lampooned.

A revival of interest in ancient Roman and Greek culture changed the tastes of the learned classes in the performing arts. Greek and Romanplays were performed and new plays were written that were heavily influenced by the classical style. This led to the creation of Commedia dell'arte and other forms of Renaissance theatre.

A change of patronage also caused drastic changes to the theatre. In England the monarch and nobility started to support professional theatre troupes (including Shakespeare's Lord Chamberlain's Men and King's Men), which catered to their upper class patron's tastes. These patrons desired to be entertained, not preached to, and as time passed the plays became more secular and refined. In time these same tastes would filter down to the lower classes.

Finally, the construction of permanent theaters, such as the Blackfriars Theatre signaled a major turning point from reliance on church facilities, touring groups, and inns as stages.

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Permanent theaters allowed for more sophisticated staging and storytelling. Moreover, professional troupes that owned their own theatre had more resources with which to prepare their productions, which changed the theatre from a mostly amateur or traveling art form to a professional one with different practices and standards.

Contributions to Theatre

Medieval theatre brought many contributions to the theatre that continue to be incorporated in productions around the world to this day. The major contributions of the Medieval theatre are the use of the vernacular, spectacle, stage direction and the use of farce. Prior to Medieval theatre, all drama was performed in Latin or Greek, however Medieval theatre evolved to the use of the vernacular about 1200 A.D. Performances that were spoken in the vernacular provided opportunities for larger audiences, who included members of lower socio-economic status, who would have otherwise been excluded from understanding the performances.

Medieval theatre differed from the classical theatre for it emphasized spectacle. In addition, it presented various actions on stage in time and space and presented a combination of the sublime with detailed realism. Approximately 1400 A.D., the dramas were performed with spectacle; no longer dependent exclusively on the spoken word, but incorporating music, dance, costume and set design. The spectacle of the later Medieval theatre made it necessary to have detailed stage directions. A sample of documented staging drawings and directions remain from the 15th century morality play The Castle of Perseverance. The evolution to the dependence on detailed stage direction made possible the great Shakespearean stage.

Farce contributed to modern theatre in that it allowed the author and the actors to ridicule and criticize their superiors whether it be in the church or in society, without retribution. This was a transition to all the future theatre including Shakespeare, who employed the use of farce with ease.

Separation of the Medieval theatre from the over-sight and support of the Church, as well as the growth of the productions in the later Medieval theatre, made it necessary to have the financial subsidization, a need that exists through the remaining history of the theatre.

Modern Day Productions of Medieval Theatre

Medieval Theatre productions are still performed today. Performances of plays outside of the church are frequent during the Christmas season with reenactments of the Nativity. The reenactment of the Passion is performed throughout the world in the late Lenten season. The most famous of the productions is The Oberammergau Passion Play. It is a passion play performed every 10 years by the inhabitants of the village of Oberammergau, Bavaria, Germany and is attended by thousands at each performance. Other recent/current adaptations include:

Central Michigan University’s Theatre on the Side performed "Everyman" University of Dallas,TX performed "The Wakefield Cycle" as a large scale outdoor

production.

The Players of St Peter in London,UK performing the Corpus Christi (or 'N' town) cycle

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State University of New York at New Paltz adaptation of The Second Shepherd's Play entitled "Fat Ram" by Professor Daniel Kempton

Roman drama and theatre

If the quality of theatre is reflected in the values of the civilization out of which it grows, then this is vividly illustrated by the fate of theatre in Roman times. Suffering from vulgarized public taste and a complete lack of originality, nearly all of the Roman plays were imitations or loose translations of Greek dramas, even to the extent of their being performed in Greek costume. Eventually, after 400 years of competing with chariot races, gladiatorial fights to the death, and the spectacle of criminals and Christians being torn apart by wild animals, theatre came to an apparent end.

Several factors must be taken into account in explaining why this happened, but perhaps the main reason lay in the political cynicism with which Roman authorities used circuses and public games, at which theatrical performances took place, to divert the public from economic and political dissatisfaction. The number of official festivals proliferated. In 240 BC, when drama was first included, the games lasted less than a week. By the 1st century AD there were 60 days of games throughout the year, and 300 years after that, 175 days were devoted to games, with plays being performed on 100 of them. Most of these festivals were secular, and theatre soon lost its close ties with religious ritual, degenerating into theatricality and crude spectacle for its own sake. 

Native traditions

In spite of the lack of originality shown by dramatists, there were in Italy a number of native comic traditions that helped to shape the style of Roman comedy. The Fescennine verses1

(fescennia locatio) were bawdy, improvised exchanges sung by clowns at local harvest festivals and marriage ceremonies. These are thought to have combined with a tradition of performances by masked dancers and musicians from Etruria to form saturae, medleys consisting of jests, slapstick, and songs. The historian Livy says that in 364 BC these Etruscan players were summoned to Rome at a time of pestilence to appease the gods with their dancing and music.

From the areas of southern Italy and Sicily settled by the Greeks came the phlyax plays in the 4th century BC. Named for the Phlyakes (literally “Gossip Players”), these were burlesques and travesties of mythology and daily life and probably improvised. They were performed on

1 Latin  Fescennini Versus,  also called  Carmina Fescennina,  early native Italian jocular dialogue in Latin verse. At vintage and harvest,

and probably at other rustic festivals, these were sung by masked dancers. They were similar to ribald wedding songs. It is clear from the literary imitations by Catullus (84–54 BC), in one of his epithalamiums, that they were very free, even obscene, in language. Horace (65–8 BC) states that they became so abusive that a law that forbade a malum carmen (“evil song”—i.e., charm intended to hurt) was invoked against them.

It was believed that the verses averted the evil eye; hence, some early historians connected the name with fascinum (“enchanting, bewitching”). The true derivation may be from Fescennia, an Etruscan city. In their origin they may have had a magico-religious intent—abuse, buffoonery, and obscenity being well-known fertility or luck charms. Whether they developed into the dramatic satura (medley, or hodgepodge) that was the forerunner of Roman drama has been debated by modern scholars. See also epithalamium.

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a raised wooden stage with an upper gallery, and the actors wore grotesque costumes and masks similar to those of the Greek Old Comedy. Acrobatics and farcical scenes were a major ingredient of the phlyax. The Oscan inhabitants of Campania, in the Neapolitan region of Italy, also had a long tradition of farces, parodies, and political satires influenced by Greek models, which became popular in Rome during the 3rd century BC. This genre was known as

fabula Atellana (“Atellan play,” Atella being the name of a Campanian town)2. The significance of the fabula Atellana is that it introduced a set of stock characters, such as Maccus and Bucco, which were thought to be the direct ancestors of many of the Italian commedia dell'arte characters. The actors wore masks, improvised their dialogue, and worked slapstick routines and other buffoonery into the plots. 

Imitation of Greek models

In the literary theatre, plot invention and characters were largely taken from Greek plays. Livius Andronicus, a Greek living in Rome, was the first to adapt Greek plays (in 240 BC), and his example was followed in 235 BC by the poet Gnaeus Naevius3, a native of Campania. Naevius can be regarded as the first native Italian playwright, and the genre of comedies he founded was called fabula palliata (“play in Greek dress”)4. His less successful tragedies on Roman history were known as fabulae praetextae (“plays in the Roman toga”). Naevius' attempts at satire were audacious enough to land him in prison, which is probably why the

2 (Latin: “Atellan play”), the earliest native Italian farce, presumably rustic improvisational comedy featuring masked stock characters. The farces derived their name from the town of Atella in the Campania region of southern Italy and seem to have originated among Italians speaking the Oscan dialect. They became a popular entertainment in ancient republican and early imperial Rome, by which time they were performed in Latin but possibly spiced with Oscan words and place-names. Originally based on scenarios handed down by oral tradition, they became a literary genre in the 1st century BC, but only a few fragments survive of works by Lucian Pomponius of Bononia, Novius, and other writers. The farces had stock characters: Maccus, the clown; Bucco (“Fat Cheeks”), the simpleton; Pappus, the old fool; Dossennus, whose name has been taken to mean “Hunchback”; and Manducus, perhaps meaning “the Glutton.” There is no record of these farces after the 1st century AD, but certain of the stock characters of the 16th-century Italian commedia dell'arte reflect the influence of the Atellan plays.3 Gnaeus Naevius born c. 270 BC, , Capua, Campania, Italy, died c. 200 BC, , Utica, Tunisia second of a triad of early Latin e pic poets and dramatists, between L ivius Andronicus and Ennius. He was the originator of historical plays (f abulae praetextae) that were based on Roman historical or legendary figures and events. The titles of two praetextae are known, Romulus and Clastidium, the latter celebrating the victory of Marcus Claudius Marcellus in 222 and probably produced at his funeral games in 208.

During 30 years of competition with Livius, Naevius produced half a dozen tragedies and more than 30 comedies, many of which are known only by their titles. Some were translated from Greek plays, and, in adapting them, he created the Latin fabula palliata (from pallium, a type of Greek cloak), perhaps being the first to introduce song and recitative, transferring elements from one play into another, and adding variety to the metre. He incorporated his own critical remarks on Roman daily life and politics, the latter leading to his imprisonment and perhaps exile. Many of the comedies used the stereotypes of character and plot and the apt and colourful language that would later be characteristic of Plautus. Tarentilla, one of his most famous plays, clearly foreshadows the Plautine formula with its vivid portrayal of Roman lowlife, intrigue, and love relationships.

Naevius chronicled the events of the First Punic War (264–261) in his Bellum Poenicum, relying for facts upon his own experience in the war and on oral tradition at Rome. The scope of the tale and the forceful diction qualify it as an epic, showing a marked advance in originality beyond the Odusia of Livius and making it a probable influence upon the Annales of Ennius and on Virgil's Aeneid.

4 plural  Fabulae Palliatae,  any of the Roman comedies that were translations or adaptations of Greek New Comedy. The name derives

from the pallium, the Latin name for the himation (a Greek cloak), and means roughly “play in Greek dress.”

The comedies retained the Greek stock characters and conventionalized plots of romantic intrigue as a framework to the satire of everyday contemporary life. The fabula palliata became something more than mere translation in the works of Plautus, who introduced Roman manners and customs, Italian place-names, and Latin puns into the Greek form, writing in a style that is characterized by boisterous humour, nimbleness and suppleness of diction, and high spirits. Terence, though closer in spirit to his Greek originals, often combined materials from two different plays into one. His style is graceful and correct, more polished but less lively than that of Plautus, and his characters are well delineated. Statius Caecilius, famed for his emotional power and well-constructed plots, and Sextus Turpilius, who kept close to Greek models, are other prominent representatives. By the mid-2nd century BC, the fabula palliata had been replaced by the fabula togata (from the Roman toga, “play in Roman dress”), but no complete work survives of this naturalized Roman comedy. It is through the fabulae palliatae of Plautus and Terence that Greek New Comedy was preserved and influenced succeeding generations of comedy in Europe from the Renaissance on.

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noted poet Quintus Ennius, who followed him as a dramatist, limited himself to safe adaptations of Greek tragedies, mostly those of Euripides.

In the 2nd century BC, the two most important comic writers of the Roman theatre, Plautusi

and Terenceii (who came from lower class backgrounds), were both influenced by the New Comedy of the Greeks, and their plays retained the Greek setting and costume. Plautus, who had few literary pretensions but a sharp sense of wit and wordplay, blended the comic style ofMenander with the fabula Atellana to produce vigorous farces5 about mistaken identities, sexual intrigues, and the mischief of household servants. His 21 surviving plays (of a total of about 130) were in turn to inspire playwrights for centuries to come, including Shakespeare. The braggart soldier, Miles Gloriosus, became one of Plautus' most imitated characters. Terence, who closely followed the style of Menander, aimed at a more discerning audience. His comedies are noted for their grace and delicacy, and they avoided the buffoonery that attracted Plautus. 

Seeds of decay

The audience that followed Terence's plays was a small and exclusive one. From the start Roman theatre was dependent on popular taste in a way that had never been known in Greece. If a play failed to please, the manager of the festival was obliged to return part of the subsidy from public funds. Thus, even in Republican times, there was some anxiety to give the public what it wanted, and this proved to be the sensational, the spectacular, and the crude. Huge amphitheatres such as the Colosseum in Rome were built throughout the empire as evidence of the power and grandeur of Rome, but not of its artistic life and energy. The general public preferred boxers, beasts, and mock sea battles to drama. Actors and dramatists were tempted to adapt their style of presentation accordingly. Where it had once been subtle, the acting became coarse and declamatory. The actors took to wearing built-up shoes (cothurni) and bigger masks in order to make themselves appear larger than life. Some of the small number

5 a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The

term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots, but it has been sustained by its popularity in performance and has persisted throughout the Western world to the present.

Antecedents of farce are found in ancient Greek and Roman theatre, both in the comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus and in the popular native Italian fabula Atellana, entertainments in which the actors played stock character types—such as glutton, graybeard, and clown—who were caught in exaggerated situations.

It was in 15th-century France that the term farce was first used to describe the elements of clowning, acrobatics, caricature, and indecency found together within a single form of entertainment. Such pieces were initially bits of impromptu buffoonery inserted by actors into the texts of religious plays—hence the use of the Old French word farce, “stuffing.” Such works were afterward written independently, the most amusing of the extant texts being Maistre Pierre Pathelin (c. 1470). French farce spread quickly throughout Europe, notable examples being the interludes of John Heywood in 16th-century England. Shakespeare and Molière eventually came to use elements of farce in their comedies.

Farce continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries; in France, Eugène-Marin Labiche's Le Chapeau de paille d'Italie (1851; An Italian Straw Hat) and Georges Feydeau's La Puce à l'oreille (1907; A Flea in Her Ear) were notable successes. Farce also surfaced in music hall, vaudeville, and boulevard entertainments.

Farce survived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in such plays as Charley's Aunt (1892) by Brandon Thomas and found new expression in film comedies with Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Kops, and the Marx Brothers. The farces presented at the Aldwych Theatre, London, between the world wars were enormously popular, and numerous successful television comedy shows attest to the durability of the form. Two examples from the second half of the century are the Italian Dario Fo's Morte accidentale di un anarchico (1974; Accidental Death of an Anarchist) and Michael Frayn's Noises Off (1982).

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of tragedies that were staged were filled out with long processions of animals, gaudy costumes, and elaborate effects, all emphasizing the hollowness of both theatre and audience.

Theatre buildings themselves became grander in the 1st century BC. Erected on flat ground, the raked semicircular auditorium was a freestanding structure of great engineering complexity. With the elimination of the chorus from plays, the orchēstra was no longer needed other than as a space for important guests to sit, and the action took place on a wide, raised stage backed by an imposing architectural facade, the scaenae frons, which was often two or three stories high. A drop curtain at the front of the stage facilitated scene changes, and the audience could be protected from harsh sunlight by a huge awning. The comfort was unrivaled, but it came too late; what took place on these stages had become trivial and degrading. It is not surprising that serious people avoided the theatres and writers were alienated from them.

One reaction against the excesses of the theatre was the custom of reading tragedies aloud to select gatherings of intellectuals. It is thought that this was the purpose behind the tragedies of Senecaiii, a Stoic philosopher and statesman under the emperor Nero in the 1st century AD , for there is no record of any of his works having been produced. While his plays lack the craftsmanship of the Greeks, Seneca's importance lies in the fact that he was the principal medium through which Renaissance writers became acquainted with Greek tragedy. His division of the plays into five acts, his exaggeration of the melodramatic and violent aspects of the originals, his emphasis on rhetoric, and his preoccupation with the conflict between passion and reason helped to shape the Elizabethan drama and French Neoclassical tragedy that followed more than a millennium later. 

Mime and pantomime

After Seneca, serious dramatic literature in Rome virtually ceased, and the newly erected stone theatres were taken over by mime (Latin mimus)iv and pantomime (pantomimus) as the level of public taste steadily fell. Pantomime grew out of the wreckage of tragedy as a kind of burlesque ballet in which a chorus chanted the story to musical accompaniment, while a solo actor used mime, gesture, and dance to portray the various characters in a succession of masksv. Particular emphasis was placed on the erotic elements of the story.

Of more interest is the mime, which was derived from the Greek mime traditions and the fabula Atellana. By the 2nd century BC, it had a large following in Rome. Mime was characterized by great diversity: sometimes the shows were tragicomic dramas, but most often they were indecent burlesques on the gods in which female performers also took part. They featured acrobatics, songs, and slapstick routines. Companies ranged from itinerant groups of six players to the troupe of 60 actors recorded in AD 169. Although the performers were highly skilled (some of them achieved widespread fame), mime contented itself with easy targets, pandering to the taste of the emperor. By the time of the Christian persecutions under Nero and Domitian, mimes were used to ridicule the Christian faith on stage. In Centunculus, for example, a clown was baptized and martyred, being grotesquely crucified in a way calculated to burlesque his faith. Sometimes the shows were spiced with sexual acts and real executions on stage. At the end of the Roman era, mime actors were performing throughout the empire, but after the triumph of Christianity the theatre of the day was abominated by the Church Fathers as an art so debased as to have lost any relevance to the general good of

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society. In the 5th century all performers of mime were excommunicated, and in the following century the theatres were closed.

The old Roman Empire was Christianized and became divided in two: one based in Rome, the other in Constantinople (modern Istanbul). There being no other outlet for the expression of the supernatural and the cycle of the seasons, semitheatrical religious festivals, magnificent rituals, and processions became once more the principal means of community celebration. These were particularly elaborate in the Byzantine Church, centred in Constantinople. Meanwhile the mimes dispersed. Though the church did its best to prohibit them through the Middle Ages, they managed to carry on their intriguing art illicitly, finding audiences wherever they could. Mime, therefore, preserves the only dramatic continuity between the classical world and modern Europe. The texts and theoretical treatises of the classical world were all to lie largely unused for more than 900 years. The failure of the Roman theatre was that it had lost its seriousness of purpose; the surviving plays were comparatively tired and unimaginative imitations that did not carry the dramatic forms forward to create an important theatrical movement. Yet, in what survived, sufficient elements were present to stimulate a new and powerful theatre during the Renaissance.

Medieval theatre

Popular traditions and secular theatre

During the Middle Ages, theatre began a new cycle of development that strangely paralleled the emergence of the theatre from ritual activity in the early Greek period. Whereas the Greek theatre had grown out of Dionysian worship, the medieval theatre originated as an expression of the Christian religion. The two cycles would eventually merge during the Renaissance, but for centuries before that the theatre was left to grope its way blindly through the Dark Ages. It meant a completely fresh start. The decadence of what remained of the Roman theatre had so offended the upright barbarian invaders, who had no sophisticated culture of their own with which to replace it, that their reaction was to try to prohibit it. Their efforts, however, were not wholly successful.

Between the classical and the medieval periods, theatre was kept alive by the slenderest of threads—the popular entertainers who had dispersed to wander, alone or in small groups, throughout Europe. These were the mimes, acrobats, dancers, animal trainers, jugglers, wrestlers, minstrels, and storytellers who preserved vital skills that survive in the theatre today. They also brought a duality to theatre that still exists: popular theatre and the literary theatre were to grow side by side, feeding off and nourishing each other. During the late Middle Ages these popular entertainers found a more secure place at royal courts and in the households of the nobility, where they acted, sang, and played music at their masters' festivities. The written texts that they developed for performance were, especially in France, literate and often sharply satirical.

A further, though minor, influence on the development of theatre was the folk play. This dramatic form had two main sources. One was the symbolic ritual dramas of the seasons such as the Plow Monday play (English Midlands), in which a plow was decorated and pulled around the village (thought to have originally been a fertility god carried around the fields on

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a plow), or the European folk drama of the Wild Man of the Woods, in which a figure covered with leaves, representing winter, was ritually hunted and “killed.” The other source was the mimetic elements in dances held at village feasts. The Morris dance (probably Moorish in origin; from Spanish morisco), famed in England but also performed in medieval continental Europe, was strongly mimetic and had dramatic elements in its use of the fool or clown character. It can also be linked with ancient trance dances in its occasional use of the hobbyhorse. The various forms of sword dance found in Europe are another example.

Both ritual and mimetic dance came together in the mummers plays that emerged during the late Middle Ages. The essential elements were some kind of fight in which one of the combatants was killed and the revival of the fighter by a healer or doctor. This pattern alsoreflects the cycle of death and rebirth, which suggests that the origin of the plays may be much older. Later versions of the mummers plays used the figure of St. George fighting a dragon, and they employed more dialogue to balance the action.

When Christianity spread through Europe, missionaries had great difficulty discouraging the wealth of local folk traditions that flourished in rural communities. Eventually, the reforming bishops decided that it was better to regulate than to prohibit them, so the Roman Catholic Church began incorporating pagan festivals into its own liturgical calendar and remythologizing local rituals. The spring cycle of festivities centring on fertility rituals and the rebirth of summer was adapted to the Christian version of death and resurrection, while Christmas absorbed celebrations around the winter solstice such as the Saturnalia and the Yule Fest, the Teutonic New Year celebration. Christian churches were built on the sites of pagan temples, and folk plays were even organized as part of the village church activities.

Typical of this tolerance was the Feast of Fools, first recorded in France at the end of the 12th century, in which the lower clergy took over the church building, wearing grotesque masks, dressing as women or minstrels, electing a mock bishop, censing with stinking smoke by burning the soles of old shoes, and generally burlesquing the mass. The inversion of status that took place in the Feast of Fools was characteristic of the folk festivals held at the time of carnival (just before the fasting of Lent) and the New Year's Saturnalia. Most of these centred on a mock king, or Lord of Misrule, who guided the follies.

Folk theatre was not a literary genre; its prime concern was to fulfill a communal function in the village. However, its significance in the development of theatre was that, being a style with which everyone was familiar, it could provide a rich stimulus for the more serious theatre that supplanted it. Many farcical scenes from folk dramas were included as interludes in the later religious plays, making them more vigorous and balancing entertainment with didacticism. Divorced from their validating mythology by the domination of Christian myths, the pagan celebrations soon began to lose their primary function, and eventually their true meaning was forgotten.

A consequence of the Roman Catholic Church's choice of Latin as the language of the liturgy was that classical texts continued to be read, and Terence, whose moral tone made him the least offensive of the Roman dramatists, acquired new popularity among a small scholarly elite. During the 10th century, at a convent in Gandersheim, Ger., a nun called Hrosvitha wrote six short plays modeled on Terence's style but in modified and Christianized form so as not to corrupt the sisters. Terence's bawds, slaves, and foolish old men were replaced by

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chaste Christian maids, honest men, and constant Christian martyrs. The plays were never publicly performed, though they may have been privately staged in the convent.

Liturgical drama

The tradition of medieval religious theatre stems directly from the mass itself, a complex ritual containing many theatrical elements in its function as a visible reflection of the invisible world. Because it was believed that harmony expressed religious values, an attempt was made from the 9th century to increase the musical effectiveness of the plainsong of the Roman Catholic Church by developing antiphonal singing in which the choir was divided into two parts. From this came the trope, a musical addition or embellishment to certain parts of the liturgy, as, for example, to the final syllable of the Alleluia. It was in the trope of the Easter mass, recorded in a 10th-century manuscript from the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, that the union of action, impersonation, and dialogue originated. Taken from various sources in the Bible, it dramatizes the visit of the three Marys to the tomb where Christ's body had been buried. They find the sepulchre empty and an angel guarding it. One section of the choir, representing the angel, asks, “Quem quaeritis?” (“Whom do you seek?”), to which the other half responds, and a short dialogue follows. In later versions the angel was represented by the priest in white robes and the Marys by three choirboys. Directions were added, dictating particular actions and precisely how the performers should move. In turn, a spice merchant (the first secular character, who was strikingly similar to the doctor figure of mummers plays and folk dramas) was added to haggle with the three Marys about the price of the ointment. The Quem quaeritis? soon spread throughout Europe (more than 400 versions survive), and by the end of the 10th century it had become a self-contained liturgical drama.

During the 11th and 12th centuries, the Nativity, along with other biblical themes, received similar treatment. To accommodate these dramas, the playing areas were extended from the altar to various locations throughout the church. Sometimes scenes were suggested by raised platforms, and machinery was developed to facilitate effects, such as angels descending. The clergy's intention of making the key episodes of the liturgy as vivid and accessible as possible to uneducated congregations was so successfully realized that by the end of the 12th century the plays incorporated spoken dialogue, partly in the vernacular, and were moved outside in front of the church to be performed independently of the liturgical service. One of the first such plays was Adam, performed before a French cathedral about 1170.

 Mystery cycles

Once the theatre had been moved outside the church, production of the plays was gradually taken over by the laity, and performances were given entirely in the vernacular. (Liturgical dramas, however, continued to be presented inside the church until the 16th century.) The number of short plays proliferated until they were organized into great cycles covering the whole biblical story from the creation to the Last Judgment, though centring on the Passion and designed to express the humanity as well as the divinity of Christ. In France they become known as mystères (from Latin ministerium, “service”), in Italy as sacre rappresentazioni, in Spain as autos sacramentales, in Germany as Mysterienspielen, and in England as mystery plays (later mystery cycles). Comprising up to 50 short plays, these cycles were sometimes performed over two or three days. In England the cycles of York, Wakefield, Coventry, and Chester survive, but on the Continent there are many more. As the presentation of these plays grew more elaborate, they became a civic affair, and special organizations took over their

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staging; e.g., in France it was the confréries, while in England, the trade guilds. Each guild would take responsibility for a particular play, usually related to its work: the building of Noah's ark, for example, would be staged by the shipwrights. Church vestments were replaced by appropriate contemporary costumes, and, because many of the plays called for complex and realistic effects—e.g., scenes of torture and execution or appearances from Hell's mouth—sophisticated properties and machinery were devised to achieve them.

Initially, in the 12th century, the cycles were presented on a series of decorated platforms known as houses or mansions, following the type of layout established in the liturgical drama, with each representing a particular location. These mansions were usually arranged in a straight line or a semicircle with the audience in front. In Italy stages were placed around a

i Titus Maccius Plautus, born c. 254 BC, , Sarsina, Umbria, Italy, died 184.

great Roman comic dramatist, whose works, loosely adapted from Greek plays, established a truly Roman drama in the Latin language.

Life. Little is known for certain about the life and personality of Plautus, who ranks with Terence as one of the two great Roman comic dramatists. His work, moreover, presents scholars with a variety of textual problems, since the manuscripts by which his plays survive are corrupt and sometimes incomplete. Nevertheless, his literary and dramatic skills make his plays enjoyable in their own right, while the achievement of his comic genius has had lasting significance in the history of Western literature and drama.

According to the grammarian Festus (2nd or 3rd century AD), Plautus was born in northeastern central Italy. His customarily assigned birth and death dates are largely based on statements made by later Latin writers, notably Cicero in the 1st century BC. Even the three names usually given to him—Titus Maccius Plautus—are of questionable historical authenticity. Internal evidence in some of the plays does, it is true, suggest that these were the names of their author, but it is possible that they are stage names, even theatrical jokes or allusions. (“Maccus,” for example, was the traditional name of the clown in the “Atellan farces,” a long-established popular burlesque, native to the Neapolitan region of southern Italy; “Plautus,” according to Festus, derives from planis pedibus, planipes [flat-footed] being a pantomime dancer.) There are further difficulties: the poet Lucius Accius (170–c. 86 BC), who made a study of his fellow Umbrian, seems to have distinguished between one Plautus and one Titus Maccius. Tradition has it that Plautus was associated with the theatre from a young age. An early story says that he lost the profits made from his early success as a playwright in an unsuccessful business venture, and that for a while afterward he was obliged to earn a living by working in a grain mill. Approach to drama. The Roman predecessors of Plautus in both tragedy and comedy borrowed most of their plots and all of their dramatic techniques from Greece. Even when handling themes taken from Roman life or legend, they presented these in Greek forms, setting, and dress. Plautus, like them, took the bulk of his plots, if not all of them, from plays written by Greek authors of the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC (who represented the “New Comedy,” as it was called), notably by Menander and Philemon. Plautus did not, however, borrow slavishly; although the life represented in his plays is superficially Greek, the flavour is Roman, and Plautus incorporated into his adaptations Roman concepts, terms, and usages. He referred to towns in Italy; to the gates, streets, and markets of Rome; to Roman laws and the business of the Roman law courts; to Roman magistrates and their duties; and to such Roman institutions as the Senate.

Not all references, however, were Romanized: Plautus apparently set little store by consistency, despite the fact that some of the Greek allusions that were left may have been unintelligible to his audiences. Terence, the more studied and polished playwright, mentions Plautus' carelessness as a translator and upbraids him for omitting an entire scene from one of his adaptations from the Greek (though there is no criticism of him for borrowing material, such plagiarism being then regarded as wholly commendable). Plautus allowed himself many other liberties in adapting his material, even combining scenes from two Greek originals into one Latin play (a procedure known as contaminatio).

Even more important was Plautus' approach to the language in which he wrote. His action was lively and slapstick, and he was able to marry the action to the word. In his hands, Latin became racy and colloquial, verse varied and choral.

Whether these new characteristics derived from now lost Greek originals—more vigorous than those of Menander—or whether they stemmed from the established forms and tastes of burlesque traditions native to Italy, cannot be determined with any certainty. The latter is the more likely. The result, at any rate, is that Plautus' plays read like originals rather than adaptations, such is his witty command of the Latin tongue—a gift admired by Cicero himself. It has often been said that Plautus' Latin is crude and “vulgar,” but it is in fact a literary idiom based upon the language of the Romans in his day.

The plots of Plautus' plays are sometimes well organized and interestingly developed, but more often they simply provide a frame for scenes of pure farce, relying heavily on intrigue, mistaken identity, and similar devices. Plautus is a truly popular dramatist, whose comic effect springs from exaggeration, burlesque and often coarse humour, rapid action, and a deliberately upside-down portrayal of life, in which slaves give orders to their masters, parents are hoodwinked to the advantage of sons who need money for girls, and the procurer or braggart soldier is outwitted and fails to secure the seduction or possession of the desired girls. Plautus, however, did also recognize the virtue of honesty (as in Bacchides), of loyalty (as in Captivi), and of nobility of character (as in the heroine of Amphitruo).

Plautus' plays, almost the earliest literary works in Latin that have survived, are written in verse, as were the Greek originals. The metres he used included the iambic six foot line (senarius) and the trochaic seven foot line (septenarius), which Menander had also employed. But

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city square with the spectators in the centre. An alternative presentation, used in England from the 14th century (and later in Spain), was processional staging on pageant wagons. This is thought to have grown out of the elaborate Corpus Christi processions (from 1311), in which decorated carts displaying religious tableaux were used. The tradition of tournaments and the pageantry set up for royal entries also had an influence. Each play was mounted on a “pageant,” or cart, often built and decorated to suggest the scene depicted. These mobile stages were paraded around the town, stopping at various stations where the actors repeated their performance in front of a group of spectators, who then waited for the next cart to appear.

Plautus varied these with longer iambic and trochaic lines and more elaborate rhythms. The metres are skillfully chosen and handled to emphasize the mood of the speaker or the action. Again, it is possible that now lost Greek plays inspired this metrical variety and inventiveness, but it is much more likely that Plautus was responding to features already existing in popular Italian dramatic traditions. The Senarii (conversational lines) were spoken, but the rest was sung or chanted to the accompaniment of double and fingered reed pipes. It could indeed be said that, in their metrical and musical liveliness, performances of Plautus' plays somewhat resembled musicals of the mid-20th century.

Plautus' original texts did not survive. Even by the time that Roman scholars such as Varro, a contemporary of Cicero, became interested in the playwright, only acting editions of his plays remained. These had been adapted, modified, cut, expanded, and generally brought up-to-date for production purposes. Critics and scholars have ever since attempted to establish a “Plautine” text, but 20th-century editors have admitted the impossibility of successfully accomplishing such a task. The plays had an active stage life at least until the time of Cicero and were occasionally performed afterward. Whereas Cicero had praised their language, the poet Horace was a more severe critic and considered the plays to lack polish. There was renewed scholarly and literary interest in Plautus during the 2nd century AD, but it is unlikely that this was accompanied by a stage revival, though a performance of Casina is reported to have been given in the early 4th century. St. Jerome, toward the end of that century, says that after a night of excessive penance he would read Plautus as a relaxation; in the mid-5th century, Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallic bishop who was also a poet, found time to read the plays and praise the playwright amid the alarms of the barbarian invasions.

During the Middle Ages, Plautus was little read—if at all—in contrast to the popular Terence. By the mid-14th century, however, the Humanist scholar and poet Petrarch knew eight of the comedies. As the remainder came to light, Plautus began to influence European domestic comedy after the Renaissance poet Ariosto had made the first imitations of Plautine comedy in the Italian vernacular. His influence was perhaps to be seen at its most sophisticated in the comedies of Molière (whose play L'Avare, for instance, was based on Aulularia), and it can be traced up to the present day in such adaptations as Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38 (1929), Cole Porter's musical Out of This World (1950), and the musical and motion picture A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1963). Plautus' stock character “types” have similarly had a long line of successors: the braggart soldier of Miles Gloriosus, for example, became the “Capitano” of the Italian commedia dell'arte, is recognizable in Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (16th century), in Shakespeare's Pistol, and even in his Falstaff, in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), and in Bernard Shaw's Sergius in Arms and the Man (1894), while a trace of the character perhaps remains in Bertolt Brecht's Eilif in Mother Courage and Her Children (1941). Thus, Plautus, in adapting Greek “New Comedy” to Roman conditions and taste, also significantly affected the course of the European theatre.

ii Publius Terentius Afer   born c. 195 BC, , Carthage, North Africa, Tunisia, died 159?, BC, in Greece or at sea. Latin in full  Publius

Terentius Afer  after Plautus the greatest Roman comic dramatist, the author of six verse comedies that were long regarded as models of pure Latin. Terence's plays form the basis of the modern c omedy of manners .

Terence was taken to Rome as a slave by Terentius Lucanus, an otherwise unknown Roman senator who was impressed by his ability and gave him a liberal education and, subsequently, his freedom.

Reliable information about the life and dramatic career of Terence is defective. There are four sources of biographical information on him: a short, gossipy life by the Roman biographer Suetonius, written nearly three centuries later; a garbled version of a commentary on the plays by the 4th-century grammarian Aelius Donatus; production notices prefixed to the play texts recording details of first (and occasionally also of later) performances; and Terence's own prologues to the plays, which, despite polemic and distortion, reveal something of his literary career. Most of the available information about Terence relates to his career as a dramatist. During his short life he produced six plays, to which the production notices assign the following dates: Andria (The Andrian Girl), 166 BC; Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law), 165 BC; Heauton timoroumenos (The Self-Tormentor), 163 BC; Eunuchus (The Eunuch), 161 BC; Phormio, 161 BC; Adelphi (or Adelphoe; The Brothers), 160 BC; Hecyra, second production, 160 BC; Hecyra, third production, 160 BC. These dates, however, pose several problems. The Eunuchus, for example, was so successful that it achieved a repeat performance and record earnings for Terence, but the prologue that Terence wrote, presumably a year later, for the Hecyra's third production gives the impression that he had not yet achieved any major success. Yet alternative date schemes are even less satisfactory.

From the beginning of his career, Terence was lucky to have the services of Lucius Ambivius Turpio, a leading actor who had promoted the career of Caecilius, the major comic playwright of the preceding generation. Now in old age, the actor did the same for Terence. Yet not all of Terence's productions enjoyed success. The Hecyra failed twice: its first production broke up in an uproar when rumours were circulated among its audience of alternative entertainment by a tightrope walker and some boxers; and the audience deserted its second production for a

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Although both audience and players were united by a common faith strong enough for the actors to rehearse months in advance and for the spectators to stand all day watching the plays, the factor of entertainment became increasingly important. This was, the religious theme notwithstanding, secular theatre. It was the comic characters, especially the devils, who were most popular, and it was here that there may have been an element of professionalism, with the minstrels and jongleurs adding their own skills and brand of humour. Furthermore, once the mystery cycles had abandoned the uniformity of Latin, national differences became accentuated when local customs, idioms, and folk traditions were incorporated into the plays. In England the juxtaposition of solemnity and humour helped to flavour the spirit of the great Elizabethan theatre that was to follow. 

gladiatorial performance nearby.

Terence faced the hostility of jealous rivals, particularly one older playwright, Luscius Lanuvinus, who launched a series of accusations against the newcomer. The main source of contention was Terence's dramatic method. It was the custom for these Roman dramatists to draw their material from earlier Greek comedies about rich young men and the difficulties that attended their amours. The adaptations varied greatly in fidelity, ranging from the creative freedom of Plautus to the literal rendering of Luscius. Although Terence was apparently fairly faithful to his Greek models, Luscius alleged that Terence was guilty of “contamination”—i.e., that he had incorporated material from secondary Greek sources into his plots, to their detriment. Terence sometimes did add extraneous material. In the Andria, which, like the Eunuchus, Heauton timoroumenos, and Adelphi, was adapted from a Greek play of the same title by Menander, he added material from another Menandrean play, the Perinthia (The Perinthian Girl). In the Eunuchus he added to Menander's Eunouchos two characters, a soldier and his “parasite”—a hanger-on whose flattery of and services to his patron were rewarded with free dinners—both of them from another play by Menander, the Kolax (The Parasite). In the Adelphi, he added an exciting scene from a play by Diphilus, a contemporary of Menander. Such conservative writers as Luscius objected to the freedom with which Terence used his models.

A further allegation was that Terence's plays were not his own work but were composed with the help of unnamed nobles. This malicious and implausible charge is left unanswered by Terence. Romans of a later period assumed that Terence must have collaborated with the Scipionic circle, a coterie of admirers of Greek literature, named after its guiding spirit, the military commander and politician Scipio Africanus the Younger.

Terence died young. When he was 35, he visited Greece and never returned from the journey. He died either in Greece from illness or at sea by shipwreck on the return voyage. Of his family life, nothing is known, except that he left a daughter and a small but valuable estate just outside Rome on the Appian Way.

Modern scholars have been preoccupied with the question of the extent to which Terence was an original writer, as opposed to a mere translator of his Greek models. Positions on both sides have been vigorously maintained, but recent critical opinion seems to accept that, in the main, Terence was faithful to the plots, ethos, and characterization of his Greek originals: thus, his humanity, his individualized characters, and his sensitive approach to relationships and personal problems all may be traced to Menander, and his obsessive attention to detail in the plots of Hecyra and Phormio derives from the Greek models of those plays by Apollodorus of Carystus of the 3rd century BC. Nevertheless, in some important particulars he reveals himself as something more than a translator. First, he shows both originality and skill in the incorporation of material from secondary models, as well as occasionally perhaps in material of his own invention; he sews this material in with unobtrusive seams. Second, his Greek models probably had expository prologues, informing their audiences of vital facts, but Terence cut them out, leaving his audiences in the same ignorance as his characters. This omission increases the element of suspense, though the plot may become too difficult for an audience to follow, as in the Hecyra.

Striving for a refined but conventional realism, Terence eliminated or reduced such unrealistic devices as the actor's direct address to the audience. He preserved the atmosphere of his models with a nice appreciation of how much Greekness would be tolerated in Rome, omitting the unintelligible and clarifying the difficult. His language is a purer version of contemporary colloquial Latin, at times shaded subtly to emphasize a character's individual speech patterns. Because they are more realistic, his characters lack some of the vitality and panache of Plautus' adaptations (Phormio here is a notable exception); but they are often developed in depth and with subtle psychology. Individual scenes retain their power today, especially those presenting brilliant narratives (e.g., Chaerea's report of his rape of the girl in the Eunuchus), civilized emotion (e.g., Micio's forgiveness of Aeschinus in the Adelphi, Bacchis' renunciation of Pamphilus in the Hecyra), or clever theatrical strokes (e.g., the double disclosure of Chremes' bigamy in the Phormio).

The influence of Terence on Roman education and on the later European theatre was very great. His language was accepted as a norm of pure Latin, and his work was studied and discussed throughout antiquity.

The best edition of the complete Latin text of Terence's plays is that by R. Kauer and W.M. Lindsay, “Oxford Classical Texts” (1926; reprinted with supplementary critical information, 1958). Notable English translations are those by Laurence Echard et al., Terence's Comedies (1689, reprinted 1963); George Colman the Elder, The Comedies of Terence Translated into Familiar Blank Verse (1765 and later editions); and Betty Radice, The Brothers and Other Plays (1965), and Phormio and Other Plays (1967), both “Penguin Classics,” combined in 1 vol., 1976.

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Morality plays

After the earthy humour and simple devotion of the mystery cycles, the morality plays that appeared during the 15th century show theatre taking what at first seems to be a step backward. These plays, however, reflect the darker worldview of a people that had experienced recurrent plagues and had begun to regard human destiny as “worm's meat,” where the skeleton figure of death was a potent emblem constantly alluded to in sermons. Morality plays were virtually sermons dramatized through allegory. They portrayed the span of human life in abstract terms, with Mankind or Humanum Genus setting out on a pilgrimage in which he encountered a whole range of vices and virtues such as Ignorance, Humility, and

iii born c. 4 BC, , Corduba, Spain, died AD 65, , Rome, byname  Seneca The Younger  Roman philosopher, statesman, orator, and tragedian.

He was Rome's leading intellectual figure in the mid-1st century AD and was virtual ruler with his friends of the Roman world between 54 and 62 during the first phase of the emperor Nero's reign.

Early life and family. Seneca was the second son of a wealthy family. The father, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Elder), had been famous in Rome as a teacher of rhetoric; the mother, Helvia, was of excellent character and education; the older brother was Gallio, met by St. Paul in Achaea in AD 52; the younger brother was the father of the poet Lucan. An aunt took Lucius as a boy to Rome; there he was trained as an orator and educated in philosophy in the school of the Sextii, which blended Stoicism with an ascetic neo-Pythagoreanism. Seneca's health suffered, and he went to recuperate in Egypt, where his aunt was the wife of the prefect, Gaius Galerius. Returning to Rome about the year 31, he began a career in politics and law. Soon he fell foul of the emperor Caligula, who was deterred from killing him only by the argument that his life was sure to be short.

In 41 the emperor Claudius banished Seneca to Corsica on a charge of adultery with the princess Julia Livilla, the Emperor's niece. In that uncongenial milieu he studied natural science and philosophy and wrote the three treatises entitled Consolationes. The influence of Agrippina, the Emperor's wife, had him recalled to Rome in 49. He became praetor in AD 50, married Pompeia Paulina, a wealthy woman, built up a powerful group of friends, including the new prefect of the guard, Sextus Afranius Burrus, and became tutor to the future emperor Nero.

The murder of Claudius in 54 pushed Seneca and Burrus to the top. Their friends held the great army commands on the German and Parthian frontiers. Nero's first public speech, drafted by Seneca, promised liberty for the Senate and an end to the influence of freedmen and women. Agrippina, Nero's mother, was resolved that her influence should continue, and there were other powerful enemies. But Seneca and Burrus, although provincials from Spain and Gaul, understood the problems of the Roman world. They introduced fiscal and judicial reforms and fostered a more humane attitude toward slaves. Their nominee Corbulo defeated the Parthians; in Britain a more enlightened administration followed the quashing of Boudicca's rebellion. But as Tacitus, the historian (c. 56–117), says, “Nothing in human affairs is more unstable and precarious than power unsupported by its own strength.” Seneca and Burrus were a tyrant's favourites. In 59 they had to condone—or to contrive—the murder of Agrippina. When Burrus died in 62 Seneca knew that he could not go on. He received permission to retire, and in his remaining years he wrote some of his best philosophical works. In 65, Seneca's enemies denounced him as having been a party to the conspiracy of Piso. Ordered to commit suicide, he met death with fortitude and composure. 

Philosophical works and tragedies. The Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii (The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius) stands apart from the rest of Seneca's surviving works. A political skit, witty and unscrupulous, its theme is the deification—or “pumpkinification”—of Claudius. The rest divide into philosophical works and the tragedies. The former expound an eclectic version of “Middle” Stoicism, adapted for the Roman market by Panaetius of Rhodes (2nd century BC), and developed by his compatriot Poseidonius in the 1st century BC. Poseidonius lies behind the books on natural science, Naturales quaestiones, where lofty generalities on the investigation of nature are offset by a jejune exposition of the facts. Of the Consolationes, Ad Marciam consoles a lady on the loss of a son; Ad Helviam matrem, Seneca's mother on his exile; Ad Polybium, the powerful freedman Polybius on the loss of a son but with a sycophantic plea for recall from Corsica. The De ira deals at length with the passion of anger, its consequences, and control. The De clementia, an exhortatory address to Nero, commends mercy as the sovereign quality for a Roman emperor. De tranquillitate animi, De constantia sapientis, De vita beata, and De otio consider various aspects of the life and qualities of the Stoic wise man. De beneficiis is a diffuse treatment of benefits as seen by giver and recipient. De brevitate vitae demonstrates that our human span is long enough if time is properly employed—which it seldom is. Best written and most compelling are the Epistulae morales, addressed to Lucilius. Those 124 brilliant essays treat a range of moral problems not easily reduced to a single formula.

Of the 10 “Senecan” tragedies, Octavia is certainly, and Hercules Oetaeus is probably, spurious. The others handle familiar Greek tragic themes, with some originality of detail. Attempts to arrange them as a schematic treatment of Stoic “vices” seem too subtle. Intended for playreadings rather than public presentation, the pitch is a high monotone, emphasizing the lurid and the supernatural. There are impressive set speeches and choral passages, but the characters are static, and they rant. The principal representatives of classical tragedy known to the Renaissance world, these plays had a great influence, notably in England. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Cyril Tourneur's Revengers Tragaedie, with their ghosts, witches, cruel tyrants, and dominant theme of vengeance, are the progeny of Seneca's tragedies. Stature and influence. Hostile propaganda pursued Seneca's memory. Quintilian, the 1st-century AD rhetorician, criticized his educational influence; Tacitus was ambivalent on Seneca's place in history. But his views on monarchy and its duties contributed to the humane and liberal temper of the age of the Antonines (Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus; AD 138–192). Meanwhile, the spread of

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the Seven Deadly Sins who contended for possession of his soul. The principal themes were the choice between good and evil, the transitory nature of life, and the immediacy of death, all of which reflect a medieval preoccupation with the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. Such concerns were particularly relevant at a time when trade and finance were rapidly expanding, offering merchants the prospect of great personal wealth and a life of material luxury.

Morality plays probably originated in England, the earliest known text being The Castell of Perseverance (c. 1405–25). However, one of the best of the genre, Everyman, began in the Netherlands, and moralities were frequently performed in France. Performances initially took place in churches, then on simple outdoor stages, though without the visual extravagance that the mystery cycles demanded. Although the plots were stereotyped and the abstract characters

Stoicism kept his philosophy alive: new horizons opened when it was found to have Christian affinities. There was a belief that he knew St. Paul and a spurious collection of letters to substantiate it. Studied by Augustine and Jerome, Seneca's works consoled Boethius in prison. His thought was a component of the Latin culture of the Middle Ages, often filtered through anthologies. Known to Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, his moral treatises were edited by Erasmus; the first complete English translation appeared in 1614. In the 16th to 18th century Senecan prose, in content and style, served the vernacular literatures as a model for essays, sermons, and moralizing. Calvin, Montaigne, and Rousseau are instances. As the first of “Spanish” thinkers, his influence in Spain was always powerful. Nineteenth-century specialization brought him under fire from philosophers, scientists, historians, and students of literature. But later scholarly work and the interest aroused by the bimillenary commemorations of his death in Spain in 1965 suggested that a Senecan revival might be under way. In his 40 surviving books the thoughts of a versatile but unoriginal mind are expressed and amplified by the resources of an individual style.

iv Latin  mimus and pantomimus , Greek  mimos and pantomimos in the strict sense, a G reek and Roman d ramatic entertainment

representing scenes from life, often in a ridiculous manner. By extension, the mime and pantomime has come to be in modern times the art of p ortraying a character or a story solely by means of body movement (as by realistic and symbolic gestures). Analogous forms of traditional non-Western t heatre are sometimes also characterized as mime or pantomime. Early Western forms. The Greco-Roman mime was a farce that stressed mimetic action but which included song and spoken dialogue. The preliterary form can only be guessed at, and even the surviving fragments of the playlets of Epicharmus, a 5th-century-BC writer of comedies, yield only the scanty information that his mimes were concerned with scenes of daily life or with mythological travesty. Other Greek writers of mimes were Sophron (fl. c. 430 BC) and Herodas (3rd century BC).

The existence of a native Italian form of mime may safely be postulated. The first to give literary form to the Roman mime was the knight Decimus Laberius (c. 105–43 BC), who was eclipsed by the former slave Publilius Syrus. The presentation of mimes was a traditional feature of the annual Floralia festival, which, being licentious in spirit, opened the popular stage to naked mime actresses.

Though only fragments exist, it is clear that the usual mime plot, while free to indulge in biting topical allusion, centred principally on scenes of adultery and other vice. Evidence exists that acts of adultery were actually performed on the mime stage during the Roman Empire. Execution scenes with convicted criminals in place of actors are on record. When condemning the Roman theatre, the early Christian writers attacked primarily the mimes in this state of degeneracy. Stock characters and situations of the classical mime found their way into the comic drama of Plautus and reappeared greatly modified in the commedia dell'arte, a Renaissance extempore entertainment with roots in the Roman theatrical tradition.

The Roman pantomime differed from mime in two ways: its themes were usually loftier, and, unlike the mime actor, the pantomimus wore various masks, which identified his characters but deprived him of speech and of the use of facial expressions. Thus his art was primarily one of posture and gesture, in which hand movements were particularly expressive and important.

The pantomimus, dressed like a tragic actor in a cloak and long tunic, usually performed solo, accompanied by an orchestra that included cymbals and other rhythm instruments, flutes, pipes, and trumpets. The libretto of the piece was sung or recited by a chorus and was usually adapted from a well-known tragedy. Both the music and the librettos of the pantomimes were considered to be of little artistic value. The talent and skill of the pantomimus himself were of supreme importance, and the greatest performers enjoyed the favour of wealthy patricians and even emperors, such as Nero and Domitian.

v form of disguise. It is an object that is frequently worn over or in front of the face to hide the identity of a person and by its own features to

establish another being. This essential characteristic of hiding and revealing personalities or moods is common to all masks. As cultural objects they have been used throughout the world in all periods since the Stone Age and have been as varied in appearance as in their use and symbolism.

 General characteristics. Masks have been designed in innumerable varieties, from the simplest of crude “false faces” held by a handle to complete head coverings with ingenious movable parts and hidden faces. Mask makers have shown great resourcefulness in selecting and combining available materials. Among the substances utilized are woods, metals, shells, fibres, ivory, clay, horn, stone, feathers, leather, furs, paper, cloth, and corn husks. Surface treatments have ranged from rugged simplicity to intricate carving and from polished woods and mosaics to gaudy adornments.

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allowed little scope for development, morality plays achieved considerable sophistication—they were intended for an educated, middle-class audience—and moved a long way toward secularization, thus forming a significant link between the medieval and the modern theatres. Nevertheless, in the 16th century, at the height of their aesthetic achievement, morality plays were suppressed in England, primarily because religious drama was beginning to become an instrument of politico-religious propaganda under successive Roman Catholic and Protestant governments. 

Interludes

As a development of the morality play that drew on the legacy of the minstrel, interludes (from Latin interludium) were performed in Europe by small companies of professional actors during the 15th and 16th centuries. The term covers a wide range of entertainment, from simple farces performed on small stages in public places to dramatic sketches performed at banquets in the halls of the nobility. In both cases the plays were purely secular and more concerned with ideas than with morals. They were called Fastnachtsspiele in Germany and kluchtspelen in the Netherlands; they were also performed in Italy and Spain, but most interludes came from France, where they were known as soties, and from England. These pieces usually dealt with the antics of foolish or cunning peasants, exploring the relationship between master and servant or husband and wife. In England the move toward professionalism was accelerated by a law that subjected “all players of farces, minstrels and other entertainers” to be whipped if they did not belong to a member of the nobility.

The Renaissance

Classical revival

By the early 15th century, artists in Italy were becoming increasingly aware that, while Rome had once been the centre of the Western world, its power and prestige had steadily declined since the invading Germanic tribes broke up the empire. The belief that art, science, and scholarship had flourished during the classical period stimulated the desire for a revival of the values of that period. Both architecture and painting found new inspiration in Greek and Roman models, and the discovery of perspective added new possibilities, which in turn were to have a profound effect on stage scenery. At the same time classical literature was reexamined: new texts were found and old ones edited. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 resulted in an exodus of Greek scholars to Italy, and they brought with them their knowledge of Greek literature.

Masks generally are worn with a costume, often so complete that it entirely covers the body of the wearer. Fundamentally the costume completes the new identity represented by the mask, and usually tradition prescribes its appearance and construction to the same extent as the mask itself. Costumes, like the masks, are made of a great variety of materials, all of which have a symbolic connection with the mask's total imagery. Ideally the costume should be seen with the mask while the wearer is in action.

The morphological elements of the mask are with few exceptions derived from natural forms. Masks with human features are classified as anthropomorphic and those with animal characteristics as theriomorphic. In some instances, the mask form is a replication of natural features or closely follows the lineaments of reality, and in other instances it is an abstraction. Masks usually represent supernatural beings, ancestors, and fanciful or imagined figures and can also be portraits. The localization of a particular spirit in a specific mask must be considered a highly significant reason for its existence. The change in identity of the wearer for that of the mask is vital, for if the spirit represented does not reside in the image of the mask, the ritual petitions, supplications, and offerings made to it would be ineffectual and meaningless. The mask, therefore, most often functions as a means of contact with various spirit powers, thereby protecting against the unknown forces of the universe by prevailing upon their potential beneficence in all matters relative to life.

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The invention in Europe of the printing press made the new learning more widely accessible and revolutionized the whole educational system. Increased commerce encouraged exploration, and the discovery of the Americas by Columbus in 1492 brought about a new outlook on the world. Whereas learning had traditionally been sought in the seclusion of monasteries, the new learning of the Renaissance was more widespread and dynamic. Scholars were not satisfied with merely understanding the ideals of antiquity; they wanted to re-create them. This also gave man new dignity and confidence. The world was regarded not as something to be overcome in order to have a life in the next world, but as something to be enjoyed. The spirit of the Renaissance was epitomized in the words of the Greek philosopher Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.” Even though this humanist view sometimes clashed with Christian doctrines, the papacy reached, if somewhat reluctantly, a modus vivendi with the new learning. Indeed, the Vatican Library amassed works of classical culture from all over the Christian world. The popes and the wealthy families of Italy became patrons of the arts, gathering scholars and artists in their courts.

The Renaissance stage

The printed Latin texts of Terence, Plautus, and Seneca were widely read. By the end of the 15th century attempts were made to stage their works, first in Rome, sponsored by Pomponius Laetus, and then in Ferrara. At first the stages resembled classicized versions of the mansions used for mystery plays, though compressed onto a single raised stage with curtained entrances between pillars to represent various houses. Later efforts concentrated on re-creating the form of the classical stage inside large halls.

One of the greatest influences on the development of theatre buildings in the Renaissance was the discovery in 1414 of De architectura of Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the 1st century. This 10-volume treatise contained valuable information on the scenery used for classical tragedy, comedy, and satyr plays, along with detailed descriptions of the Roman theatre with its auditorium, orchestra, and stage backed by the scaenae frons. Vitruvius' work, translated and published all over Europe, was provided with woodcuts showing ground plans and front elevations of classical stages. Various reconstructions of the Roman theatre were built, culminating in the beautiful Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, designed by the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio and completed in 1585 by Vincenzo Scamozzi. It is Europe's oldest surviving indoor theatre. Palladio had created a magnificent scaenae frons, but Scamozzi added three-dimensional perspective vistas of street scenes behind the archways. It was this preoccupation with perspective that characterized future developments of the Renaissance stage and indeed the modern theatre, though the effects were usually achieved through painted backdrops and wings. Sebastiano Serlio's influential Second livre de la perspective (1545; The Second Book of Architecture), generally referred to as “Architettura,” outlined three basic stage settings, suggesting an impressive arrangement of palaces and temples for tragedy, complex street scenes for comedy, and idealized landscapes with trees and cottages for pastoral plays.

 

Major theatrical styles, tendencies, and forms

Italian Neoclassicism

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Ironically, while all the innovations seemed to originate in Italy and then spread through Europe, the plays that were first performed on the new stages were extremely dull. Far from liberating the creative mind, the classical ideals had only constricted it. Partly to blame was the adoption of the so-called Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, which became, in the hands of theorists, a set of rules so rigid that they strangled drama by forcing it into a framework where the action had to take place in a single location in the space of a single day. At a time of expansion and change, such rules only created a disharmony between form and content and between the stage and the play. A further reason was that this theatre took place inside the palaces of isolated and parochial cities in the presence of a privileged elite. Cut off from the public, lifeless tragedies and limp comedies resorted to philosophical discourse as a substitute for the passion that was meanwhile animating the theatre in England and Spain.

Significantly, the bawdy comedies of Plautus provided inspiration for two of the most interesting dramatists of the Italian Renaissance in the early 16th century. Ludovico Ariosto, a poet at the court of Ferrara, was the first to break away from the strict imitation of classical models and produce a truly Italian flavour in his work. The second figure was Ruzzante (the stage name of Angelo Beolco), who acted in his own farces about rustic life written in the Paduan dialect. Through his use of everyday situations and distinctly Italian character types, Ruzzante introduced a more natural style of acting, drawn from life and observation of people.

As a relief from the severity of classical plays, intermezzi were introduced between the acts as lighthearted and spectacular diversions, usually dealing with mythological subjects. These rapidly became more popular than the plays themselves and were often performed as independent entertainments at weddings and banquets in the courts of Italian princes. As the scenic aspects of the intermezzi grew more elaborate, changeable scenery was developed, as was complicated machinery with which to mobilize clouds, waves, and sea monsters. Five basic settings were established: heaven, hell, the countryside, the sea, and a city street or square.

 Courtly entertainments

During the 15th and 16th centuries, some of Italy's finest painters and musicians were employed to organize entertainments at court. Leonardo da Vinci, who designed a revolving stage in 1490 (it was never built, however), arranged the settings, masks, and costumes of Festa del Paradiso, an entertainment given during the wedding celebrations for Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan. Raphael also painted much admired stage settings. Equestrian ballets and triumphal processions were a spectacular feature requiring careful preparation, and they became the highlight of these displays of power and wealth. Princes, dukes, and monarchs were invited to such festivals and rode on horseback or in ornate carriages in processions of allegorical floats. Sometimes their entrances were choreographed as they passed under specially constructed triumphal arches or towers and open stages with tableaux vivants. In France the entrées solennelles—entrance processions of great pomposity—were developed to a peak of elaborate ceremonial display. Aquatic pageantry also became popular in the 17th century, with the monarch surrounded by a collection of ornate barges, sea monsters, scallop shells, and ships.

A popular new genre among the Italian nobility in the latter half of the 16th century was the pastoral. It was a sophisticated form of entertainment dramatizing classical themes in the

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romantic but highly artificial setting of an Arcadian landscape peopled with gentle nymphs, shepherds, magicians, and satyrs.

Opera

One of the most enduring products of the Renaissance theatre was the opera. It grew out of experiments by the Florentine Camerata at the end of the 16th century to revive Greek tragedy. The men who formed the Florentine Camerata believed that the Greeks had originally recited or chanted their plays to music, and in setting out to recreate these conditions, the Camerata used music to heighten the poetic qualities of the dialogue. Heavily influenced by the intermezzi that were currently in fashion, the first attempts were on mythological subjects (Daphne, Orpheus, etc.). The opera was an immediate success. The novelty impact of the music meant that the libretto diminished in importance. By 1607 Claudio Monteverdi had composed his masterpiece, Orfeo, which placed the emphasis squarely on music and established the basic form that European opera was to take for the next 300 years.

At first, opera was performed on special occasions intended to display the patron's status and wealth; thus it was politically important. Great care was lavished on the visual aspects of the opera, and the librettos gave ample opportunities for scene painters and stage engineers to exploit their new mastery of perspective. As the scenery became more opulent, so the shape of the theatre was altered to accommodate it. The proscenium arch was developed to frame the setting and facilitate changes of scenery, while the auditorium was extended to a horseshoe shape. The earliest example of this type of theatre was the Teatro Farnese in Parma (1618–28), the prototype of the modern opera house. From its exclusive beginnings, the appeal of opera broadened, and in 1637 the first opera house was opened to the general public in Venice. By this time, the form had also caught on in Vienna.

Commedia dell'arte

Around the mid-16th century, there emerged in Italy a lively tradition of popular theatre that fused many disparate elements into a vigorous style, which profoundly influenced the development of European theatre. This was the legendary commedia dell'arte (“theatre of the professionals”), a nonliterary tradition that centred on the actor, as distinguished from the commedia erudita, where the writer was preeminent. Although the precise origins of the commedia dell'arte are difficult to establish, its many similarities with the skills of the medieval jongleurs, who were themselves descendants of the Roman mimes, suggest that it may have been a reawakening of the fabula Atellana, stimulated and coloured by social conditions in Italy during the Renaissance.

In spite of its outwardly anarchic spirit, the commedia dell'arte was a highly disciplined art requiring both virtuosity and a strong sense of ensemble playing. Its special quality came from improvisation. Working from a scenario that outlined the plot, the actors would improvise their own dialogue, striving for a balance of words and actions. Acrobatics and singing were also used, as well as the lazzi (special rehearsed routines that could be inserted into the plays at convenient points to heighten the comedy). Because the actors stayed together in permanent companies and specialized in playing the same role for most of their professional lives, they achieved a degree of mastery that had been hitherto unknown on the Italian stage and that must have made the rest of the theatre seem all the more artificial. Another reason for the

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impact of the commedia dell'arte was that it heralded the first appearance in Italy of professional actresses (the best known being Isabella Andreini), though the female characters were never as sharply developed as their male counterparts. Most of the characters were defined by the leather half-masks they wore (another link with the theatre of antiquity), which made them instantly recognizable. They also spoke in the dialect of their different provinces. Characters such as Pantalone, the miserly Venetian merchant; Dottore Gratiano, the pedant from Bologna; or Arlecchino, the mischievous servant from Bergamo, began as satires on Italian “types” and became the archetypes of many of the favourite characters of 17th- and 18th-century European theatre.

From humble beginnings, setting up their stages in city squares, the better troupes—notably Gelosi, Confidenti, and Fedeli—performed in palaces and became internationally famous once they traveled abroad. The commedia dell'arte swept through Europe. It was particularly popular in France, where resident Italian troupes were established before the end of the 16th century. Local variations on the characters appeared in the 17th century. The cheeky servant Pedrolino became the melancholy Pierrot in France, while Pulcinella became Punch in England. By the 18th century the commedia dell'arte was a lost art, though its spirit lived on through the work of the dramatists it inspired, among whom were Molière (stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), Carlo Goldoni, and William Shakespeare.

 Jesuit theatre and school drama

A reflection of the humanist tradition in Europe was the emergence of the school drama in the second half of the 16th century. This was an amateur movement in which Latin plays were performed as part of the curriculum. Soon after the Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 to combat the heresies of the Reformation, it was realized that theatre could be an excellent means of glorifying the Roman Catholic Church and showing the evils of free thought. Consequently, the school play became an important activity in the Jesuit colleges that were established all over the Continent. While retaining both the language and techniques of the classical writers, the Jesuit dramatists turned to biblical themes and the lives of the saints and martyrs for their subject matter. Since part of the educational purpose of this type of drama was to teach pupils how to behave and express themselves in accordance with the requirements of the upper classes, tragedies were preferred to comedies, because the latter were considered unsuitable in their levity and crudeness. In spite of its severity of tone, the Jesuit theatre flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries by adapting to local customs and turning the latest theatrical innovations to its own use. Thus music and singing were incorporated in the plays, which were eventually expanded to include some of the elaborate scenic effects used in contemporary opera. The Jesuit theatre produced no plays of lasting consequence, yet princes took part in its college performances and Roman Catholic emperors attended them. Also, some of the most important dramatists of the European theatre, including Pierre Corneille, Molière, and Goldoni, were educated in Jesuit schools and may have been influenced by their theatrical activities.

Although the movement did not reach England for politico-religious reasons, school plays accounted for the first secular comedies in English during the first half of the 16th century—namely, Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle. And, in 1560, Elizabeth I decreed that the scholars of Westminster School should perform a Latin play every Christmas.

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This practice has endured until the present day, making it perhaps the longest continuous acting tradition in Europe.

 

Spain's Golden Age

Because the Reformation, which divided Europe in the early 16th century, had not affected Spain, the long tradition of religious drama continued there throughout the Renaissance in the form of autos sacramentales. Usually one-act allegories, these plays were performed as part of the Corpus Christi celebrations in which the king participated. As the prudent Spanish clergy had purged religious drama of those elements that laid it open to ridicule in other European countries, autos became a serious art form cultivated by some of the finest poets of the Spanish Golden Age.

The vigour of the secular theatre was offset by a lack of permanent playhouses. In the early 16th century, the first professional companies, like that of Lope de Rueda, had to travel about as strolling players, carrying their own equipment with them. They were so poor that, in the words of Cervantes, “their whole baggage would go into a single sack.” Lope de Rueda was noted for the lively use of colloquial speech in his short comic sketches known as pasos. These were performed between the acts of more serious dramas. Plays were sometimes presented in palace halls, but most often they were performed in corrales, where an improvised stage was set up at one end of the square formed by the walls of adjoining houses.

When the first permanent theatres were built, they were not patterned on the Italian model, but rather they incorporated features of the corrale. The audience stood in a rectangular courtyard (patio) or sat in galleries, with the women having to sit apart in a special gallery of their own. The stage stretched across one end of the square with an inner stage at the back. Very little scenery was used, though there were trapdoors in the floor and machinery above for “flying” people or objects. The theatre was open to the sky, but an awning could be drawn over the audience to provide protection against sunlight and rain. It was a stage well adapted for rhetoric and poetry, where the imagination of the audience could be stimulated. Furthermore, it was a theatre for all social classes. By the end of the 16th century, permanent theatres were established in Seville, Valencia, and Madrid, where two of the first were the Corral de la Cruz (1579) and the Corral del Príncipe (1582). In addition to the main play, programs included short comic sketches, musical interludes, ballads, and dances.

The strength of the Spanish theatre of the Golden Age was that, while embracing some of the Italian innovations in staging and acting (commedia dell'arte troupes exerted a strong influence in Spain from 1574), it was never restrained by the rules of Classicism. Instead, it developed a robust national style that was passionate, romantic, and lyrical and that could weave together comedy and tragedy in a way that was never possible in Italy or France. This style found rich expression in the work of Lope de Vega. His prodigious output of more than 1,000 plays, about 400 of which survive, gives an idea of the audience's insatiable demand for new works. Drawing on a wide variety of materials for tragedies, comedies, pastorals, histories, and the distinctly Spanish genre of comedias de capa y espada (cloak-and-dagger plays), Lope portrayed a rigid society divided into three estates: the king, the nobles, and the common people. Entertainment was his first concern, and his depiction of peasant characters, both comic and tragic, was particularly vivid.

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In the first half of the 17th century the Baroque style of theatre, with its elaborate scenery and stage machinery, was used to great advantage by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Attached to the Spanish court, he was not under as much pressure as Lope to be prolifically inventive, yet he wrote nearly 200 plays. While lacking the sheer vigour of Lope's works, Calderón's plays are more refined and philosophical, even though many of his characters appear to be rigidly bound by the idea of the pundonor (“point of honour”). In later life, Calderón wrote many fine autos sacramentales and other plays on religious themes. The idea that “all the world is a stage” was expressed in El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1635; The Great Theatre of the World) through the hierarchical concept that every man plays his part before God. This theme was also reflected in Calderón's finest play, La vida es sueño (1635; Life Is a Dream).

 

Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre

In England the influence of the Italian Renaissance was weaker, but the theatre of the Elizabethan Age was all the stronger for it. Apart from the rediscovery of classical culture, the 16th century in England was a time for developing a new sense of national identity, necessitated by the establishment of a national church. Furthermore, because the English were more suspicious of Rome and the Latin tradition, there was less imitation of classical dramatic forms and an almost complete disregard for the rules that bound the theatre in France and Italy. England built on its own foundations by adapting the strong native tradition of medieval religious drama to serve a more secular purpose. When some of the continental innovations were blended with this cruder indigenous strain, a rich synthesis was produced. Consequently, the theatre that emerged was resonant, varied, and in touch with all segments of society. It included the high seriousness of morality plays, the sweep of chronicle histories, the fantasy of romantic comedies, and the irreverent fun of the interludes.

At the same time, the theatre had to contend with severe restrictions. The suppression of the festival of Corpus Christi in 1548 as a means of reinforcing the Protestant Church marked therapid decline of morality plays and mystery cycles. Their forced descent into satirical propaganda mocking the Catholic faith polarized the audience and led to riots. By 1590, playwrights were prohibited from dramatizing religious issues and had to resort to history, mythology, allegory, or allusion in order to say anything about contemporary society. Flouting these restrictions meant imprisonment. Nevertheless, playwrights managed to argue highly explosive political topics. In Shakespeare's histories, for instance, the subject of kingship is thoroughly examined in all its implications: both the rightful but incompetent sovereign and the usurping but strong monarch are scrutinized—a most daring undertaking during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603). The situation for actors was not helped by the hostile attitude of the City of London authorities, who regarded theatre as an immoral pastime to be discouraged rather than tolerated. Professional companies, however, were invited to perform at court from the beginning of the 16th century (though on a smaller scale than on the Continent), and public performances took place wherever a suitable space could be found—in large rooms of inns, in halls, or in quiet innyards enclosed on all sides with a temporary platform stage around which spectators could gather while others looked out from the windows above. But such makeshift conditions only retarded the development of the drama and kept it on an amateurish level.

 

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The Elizabethan theatre

These conditions were considerably improved during Elizabeth's reign by the legitimizing in 1574 of regular weekday performances and the building of the first playhouse in 1576 by James Burbage. Called simply the Theatre, it was erected in London immediately outside the City boundary. Others followed, including the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, and the Globe, where most of Shakespeare's plays were first staged. Just as the Spanish playhouse reproduced the features of the corrale it had grown out of, so the Elizabethan playhouse followed the pattern of the improvised innyard theatre. It was an enclosed circular structure containing two or three galleries with benches or stools and had an unroofed space in the middle where spectators could stand on three sides of the raised platform stage. Behind the stage was a wall with curtained doors and, above this, an actors' and musicians' gallery. Large numbers of people could be accommodated, and the price was kept low at between one penny and sixpence. This type of stage allowed for fluid movement and considerable intimacy between actors and audience, while its lack of scenery placed the emphasis firmly on the actor interpreting the playwright's words. Such sheer simplicity presented a superb challenge for the writer: the quality of both language and acting had to be good enough to hold the attention of the spectators and make them use their imaginations.

This challenge was quickly taken up by a generation of playwrights who could carry forward the established dramatic forms and test the possibilities of the new stage. Christopher Marlowe was the major innovator, developing a vigorous style of tragedy that was refined by his contemporary, William Shakespeare, who began writing for the theatre about 1590. At this time, professional companies operated under the patronage of a member of the nobility. In Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's Men (later renamed the King's Men), the actors owned their playhouse, prompt books, costumes, and properties, and they shared in the profits. Other companies paid rent to the patron and received salaries from him. There were very few rehearsals for a new play, and because the texts were not immediately printed (to avoid pirating by rival companies) each actor was usually given only his own lines, with the relevant cues, in manuscript form. No women appeared on the Elizabethan stage; female roles were taken either by boy actors or, in the case of older women, by adult male comedians. As in Italy, all the actors had to be able to sing and dance and often to make their own music. The great actors of the day were Richard Burbage, who worked in Shakespeare's company, and Edward Alleyn, who was mainly associated with Ben Jonson. In spite of the fact that theatres such as the Globe played to a cross section of London's populace, audiences seem to have been attentive and well behaved.

An alternative to the outdoor public playhouse was the private indoor theatre. The first of these was an abandoned monastery near St. Paul's Cathedral, converted in 1576 by Richard Farrant and renamed the Blackfriars Theatre. Others included the Cockpit, the Salisbury Court, and the Whitefriars. Initially these theatres were closer to the Spanish model, with the bare stage across one end, an inner stage at the back, benches in front for the audience, and galleries all around. Later, they made use of more elaborate scenery and featured the Italian-style proscenium arch. Because of the reduced size of the audience, higher prices had to be charged, which excluded all but the more wealthy and learned segment of the public. This in turn affected the style of writing; these private theatres were mostly used by boy companies that presented a more refined and artificial type of drama. One of their chief dramatists was John Lyly, though Ben Jonson wrote many of his plays for them. Growing rivalry between the boy and adult companies, exacerbated by hostility from the increasingly powerful Puritan

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movement, resulted in James I imposing even tighter controls and exercising heavy censorship on the theatre when he came to the throne in 1603.

 Jacobean theatre

Although the Italian influence gradually became stronger in the early part of the 17th century, the English theatre was by then established and confident enough to take over foreign ideas without losing any of its individuality. Jonson became increasingly preoccupied with the dramatic unities, while other writers of the Jacobean period such as John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford favoured a more definite separation of comedy and tragedy than had been the case in Elizabethan drama. They were given to sensationalism in their revenge plays, finding inspiration in the darker moods of Seneca and often setting them in Italy.

Meanwhile, at court the pastoral was finding new popularity, partly because it provided opportunities for spectacular scenery, and with it came the revival of the masque—a allegorical entertainment combining poetry, music, dance, scenery, and extravagant costumes. As court poet, Ben Jonson collaborated with the architect and designer Inigo Jones to produce some of the finest examples of the masque. Having spent a few years in Italy, Jones was greatly influenced by the Italian painted scenery and its use of machinery. On his return to England he did much to bring scenic design up to date, introducing many innovations. Members of the court had thorough training in dancing, fencing, singing, instrumental music, and courtly ceremonial. They were therefore well prepared to perform in the masques, even to take solo parts and to appear in the chorus. Masques became even more elaborate under Charles I, but in 1634 Jonson angrily withdrew his contribution when he saw that the visual elements were completely overtaking the dramatic content. When the Civil War broke out in 1642, the Puritans closed all the theatres and forbade dramatic performances of any kind. This created an almost complete break in the acting tradition for 18 years until the Restoration of Charles II, after which the theatre flourished once more, though on quite different lines.

ANNEX:

UNIVERSITY WITS

the notable group of pioneer English dramatists who wrote during the last 15 years of the 16th century and who transformed the native interlude and chronicle play with their plays of quality and diversity.

The university wits include Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe (all graduates of Cambridge), as well as Thomas Lodge and George Peele (both of Oxford). Another of the wits, though not university-trained, was Thomas Kyd. Preceded by John Lyly (an Oxford man), they prepared the way for William Shakespeare. The greatest poetic dramatist among them was Marlowe, whose handling of blank verse gave the theatre its characteristic voice for the next 50 years.

Christopher Marlowe, baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury, Kent, Eng., died May 30, 1593, Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare's most important predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse.

Early years

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Marlowe was the second child and eldest son of John Marlowe, a Canterbury shoemaker. Nothing is known of his first schooling, but on Jan. 14, 1579, he entered the King's School, Canterbury, as a scholar. A year later he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Obtaining his bachelor of arts degree in 1584, he continued in residence at Cambridge—which may imply that he was intending to take Anglican orders. In 1587, however, the university hesitated about granting him the master's degree; its doubts (arising from his frequent absences from the university) were apparently set at rest when the Privy Council sent a letter declaring that he had been employed “on matters touching the benefit of his country”—apparently in Elizabeth I's secret service. 

Last years and literary career.

After 1587 Marlowe was in London, writing for the theatres, occasionally getting into trouble with the authorities because of his violent and disreputable behaviour, and probably also engaging himself from time to time in government service. Marlowe won a dangerous reputation for “atheism,” but this could, in Elizabeth I's time, indicate merely unorthodox religious opinions. In Robert Greene's deathbed tract, Greenes groats-worth of witte, Marlowe is referred to as a “famous gracer of Tragedians” and is reproved for having said, like Greene himself, “There is no god” and for having studied “pestilent Machiuilian pollicie.” There is further evidence of his unorthodoxy, notably in the denunciation of him written by the spy Richard Baines and in the letter of Thomas Kyd to the lord keeper in 1593 after Marlowe's death. Kyd alleged that certain papers “denying the deity of Jesus Christ” that were found in his room belonged to Marlowe, who had shared the room two years before. Both Baines and Kyd suggested on Marlowe's part atheism in the stricter sense and a persistent delight in blasphemy. Whatever the case may be, on May 18, 1593, the Privy Council issued an order for Marlowe's arrest; two days later the poet was ordered to give daily attendance on their lordships “until he shall be licensed to the contrary.” On May 30, however, Marlowe was killed by Ingram Frizer, in the dubious company of Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, at a lodging house in Deptford, where they had spent most of the day and where, it was alleged, a fight broke out between them over the bill.

In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe's achievements were diverse and splendid. Perhaps before leaving Cambridge he had already written Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the end of 1587; published 1590). Almost certainly during his later Cambridge years, Marlowe had translated Ovid's Amores (The Loves) and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia from the Latin. About this time he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage (published in 1594 as the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe). With the production of Tamburlaine he received recognition and acclaim, and playwriting became his major concern in the few years that lay ahead. Both parts of Tamburlaine were published anonymously in 1590, and the publisher omitted certain passages that he found incongruous with the play's serious concern with history; even so, the extant Tamburlaine text can be regarded as substantially Marlowe's. No other of his plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished but splendid poem Hero and Leander—which is almost certainly the finest nondramatic Elizabethan poem apart from those produced by Edmund Spenser—appeared in 1598.

There is argument among scholars concerning the order in which the plays subsequent to Tamburlaine were written. It is not uncommonly held that Faustus quickly followed Tamburlaine and that then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more “social” kind of writing in

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Edward II and The Massacre at Paris. His last play may have been The Jew of Malta, in which he signally broke new ground. It is known that Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew of Malta were performed by the Admiral's Men, a company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly played Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew. 

Works.

In the earliest of Marlowe's plays, the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587; published 1590), Marlowe's characteristic “mighty line” (as Ben Jonson called it) established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. It appears that originally Marlowe intended to write only the first part, concluding with Tamburlaine's marriage to Zenocrate and his making “truce with all the world.” But the popularity of the first part encouraged Marlowe to continue the story to Tamburlaine's death. This gave him some difficulty, as he had almost exhausted his historical sources in part I; consequently the sequel has, at first glance, an appearance of padding. Yet the effort demanded in writing the continuation made the young playwright look more coldly and searchingly at the hero he had chosen, and thus part II makes explicit certain notions that were below the surface and insufficiently recognized by the dramatist in part I.

The play is based on the life and achievements of Timur (Timurlenk), the bloody 14th-century conqueror of Central Asia and India. Tamburlaine is a man avid for power and luxury and the possession of beauty: at the beginning of part I he is only an obscure Scythian shepherd, but he wins the crown of Persia by eloquence and bravery and a readiness to discard loyalty. He then conquers Bajazeth, emperor of Turkey, he puts the town of Damascus to the sword, and he conquers the sultan of Egypt; but, at the pleas of the sultan's daughter Zenocrate, the captive whom he loves, he spares him and makes truce. In part II Tamburlaine's conquests are further extended; whenever he fights a battle, he must win, even when his last illness is upon him. But Zenocrate dies, and their three sons provide a manifestly imperfect means for ensuring the preservation of his wide dominions; he kills Calyphas, one of these sons, when he refuses to follow his father into battle. Always, too, there are more battles to fight: when for a moment he has no immediate opponent on earth, he dreams of leading his army against the powers of heaven, though at other times he glories in seeing himself as “the scourge of God”; he burns the Qurʾān, for he will have no intermediary between God and himself, and there is a hint of doubt whether even God is to be granted recognition. Certainly Marlowe feels sympathy with his hero, giving him magnificent verse to speak, delighting in his dreams of power and of the possession of beauty, as seen in the following of Tamburlaine's lines:

Nature, that fram'd us of four elementsWarring within our breasts for regiment,Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:Our souls, whose faculties can comprehendThe wondrous architecture of the world,And measure every wandering planet's course,Still climbing after knowledge infinite,And always moving as the restless spheres,Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,That perfect bliss and sole felicity,The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

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But, especially in part II, there are other strains: the hero can be absurd in his continual striving for more demonstrations of his power; his cruelty, which is extreme, becomes sickening; his human weakness is increasingly underlined, most notably in the onset of his fatal illness immediately after his arrogant burning of the Qurʾān. In this early play Marlowe already shows the ability to view a tragic hero from more than one angle, achieving a simultaneous vision of grandeur and impotence.

Marlowe's most famous play is The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus; but it has survived only in a corrupt form, and its date of composition has been much-disputed. It was first published in 1604, and another version appeared in 1616. Faustus takes over the dramatic framework of the morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation, fall, and damnation and its free use of morality figures such as the good angel and the bad angel and the seven deadly sins, along with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles. In Faustus Marlowe tells the story of the doctor-turned-necromancer Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. The devil's intermediary in the play, Mephistopheles, achieves tragic grandeur in his own right as a fallen angel torn between satanic pride and dark despair. The play gives eloquent expression to this idea of damnation in the lament of Mephistopheles for a lost heaven and in Faustus' final despairing entreaties to be saved by Christ before his soul is claimed by the devil:

The stars move still, time runs, the clockwill strike,The devil will come, and Faustus mustbe damn'd.O, I'll leap up to my God!—Who pullsme down?—See, see, where Christ's blood streams inthe firmament!One drop would save my soul, half a drop:ah, my Christ!—Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!

Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!—Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where GodStretcheth out his arm, and bends hisireful brows!Mountains and hills, come, come, and fallon me,And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!

Just as in Tamburlaine Marlowe had seen the cruelty and absurdity of his hero as well as his magnificence, so here he can enter into Faustus' grandiose intellectual ambition, simultaneously viewing those ambitions as futile, self-destructive, and absurd. The text is problematic in the low comic scenes spuriously introduced by later hack writers, but its more sober and consistent moments are certainly the uncorrupted work of Marlowe.

In The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, Marlowe portrays another power-hungry figure in the Jew Barabas, who in the villainous society of Christian Malta shows no scruple in self-advancement. But this figure is more closely incorporated within his society than either Tamburlaine, the supreme conqueror, or Faustus, the lonely adventurer against God. In the

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end Barabas is overcome, not by a divine stroke but by the concerted action of his human enemies. There is a difficulty in deciding how fully the extant text of The Jew of Malta represents Marlowe's original play, for it was not published until 1633. But The Jew can be closely associated with The Massacre at Paris (1593), a dramatic presentation of incidents from contemporary French history, including the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, and with The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (published 1594), Marlowe's great contribution to the Elizabethan plays on historical themes.

As The Massacre introduces in the duke of Guise a figure unscrupulously avid for power, so in the younger Mortimer of Edward II Marlowe shows a man developing an appetite for power and increasingly corrupted as power comes to him. In each instance the dramatist shares in the excitement of the pursuit of glory, but all three plays present such figures within a social framework: the notion of social responsibility, the notion of corruption through power, and the notion of the suffering that the exercise of power entails are all prominently the dramatist's concern. Apart from Tamburlaine and the minor work Dido, Queen of Carthage (of uncertain date, published 1594 and written in collaboration with Thomas Nashe), Edward II is the only one of Marlowe's plays whose extant text can be relied on as adequately representing the author's manuscript. And certainly Edward II is a major work, not merely one of the first Elizabethan plays on an English historical theme. The relationships linking the king, his neglected queen, the king's favourite, Gaveston, and the ambitious Mortimer are studied with detached sympathy and remarkable understanding: no character here is lightly disposed of, and the abdication and the brutal murder of Edward show the same dark and violent imagination as appeared in Marlowe's presentation of Faustus' last hour. Though this play, along with The Jew and The Massacre, shows Marlowe's fascinated response to the distorted Elizabethan idea of Machiavelli, it more importantly shows Marlowe's deeply suggestive awareness of the nature of disaster, the power of society, and the dark extent of an individual's suffering.

In addition to translations (Ovid's Amores and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia), Marlowe's nondramatic work includes the poem Hero and Leander. This work was incomplete at his death and was extended by George Chapman: the joint work of the two poets was published in 1598.

An authoritative edition of Marlowe's works was edited by Fredson Bowers, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1981).

Robert Green, born July 1558?, Norwich, Eng., died Sept. 3, 1592, London, one of the most popular English prose writers of the later 16th century and Shakespeare's most successful predecessor in blank-verse romantic comedy. He was also one of the first professional writers and among the earliest English autobiographers.

Greene obtained degrees at both Cambridge and Oxford. He then went to London, where he became an intimate of its underworld. He wrote more than 35 works between 1580 and 1592. To be certain of supplying material attractive to the public, Greene at first slavishly followed literary fashions. His first model was John Lyly's Euphues.

In the later 1580s Greene wrote prose pastorals in the manner of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, interspersed with charming, often irrelevant lyrics that have given Greene a reputation as a

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poet. The best of his pastorals is Pandosto (1588), the direct source of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

About 1590 Greene began to compose serious didactic works. Beginning with Greenes never too late (1590), he related prodigal son stories. That Greene drew on his own experience is evident from the tract Greenes groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of repentance, printed posthumously in 1592 with Greene's admission that Roberto's experiences were essentially his own. In Groats-worth appears the first printed reference to Shakespeare, assailed as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you . . . in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.” (The words in italics are from Shakespeare's I Henry VI.) Greene is thought to be criticizing Shakespeare the actor.

Greene's writings for the theatre present numerous problems; the dating of his plays is conjectural, and his role as collaborator has produced much inconclusive discussion. With The Honorable Historie of frier Bacon, and frier Bongay (written c. 1591, published 1594), the first successful romantic comedy in English, Greene realized his comic talent in drama. In The Scottish Historie of James the fourth, slaine at Flodden (written c. 1590, published 1598) he used an Italian tale but drew on fairy lore for the characters of Oberon and Bohan. It was a forerunner of As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream. As Marlowe anticipated the tragedies of Shakespeare, so, in a lesser way, Greene furnished him a model in dramatic comedy and romance.

In his last year Greene wrote exposés of the Elizabethan underworld, such as A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591) and the successful and amusing A disputation betweene a hee conny-catcher and a shee conny-catcher (1592).

Thomas Nashe, born 1567, Lowestoft, Suffolk, Eng., died c. 1601, Yarmouth, Norfolk?

Thomas Nashe also spelled  Nash  pamphleteer, poet, dramatist, and author of The Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke Wilton (1594), the first picaresque novel in English.

Nashe was educated at the University of Cambridge, and about 1588 he went to London, where he became associated with Robert Greene and other professional writers. In 1589 he wrote The Anatomie of Absurditie and the preface to Greene's Menaphon. Both works are bold, opinionated surveys of the contemporary state of writing; occasionally obscure, they are euphuistic in style and range freely over a great variety of topics.

In 1589 and 1590 he evidently became a paid hack of the episcopacy in the Marprelate controversy and matched wits with the unidentified Puritan “Martin.” Almost all the Anglican replies to Martin have variously been assigned to Nashe, but only An Almond for a Parrat (1590) has been convincingly attributed to him. He wrote the preface to Thomas Newman's unauthorized edition of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1591). Though Nashe penned an extravagant dedication to Sidney's sister, the countess of Pembroke, the book was withdrawn and reissued in the same year without Nashe's foreword.

Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592), a satire focused on the seven deadly sins, was Nashe's first distinctive work. Using a free and extemporaneous prose style, full of

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colloquialisms, newly coined words, and fantastic idiosyncrasies, Nashe buttonholes the reader with a story in which a need for immediate entertainment seems to predominate over any narrative structure or controlling objective. Having become involved in his friend Greene's feud with the writer Gabriel Harvey, Nashe satirized Harvey and his brothers in Pierce and then joined the combat in an exchange of pamphlets with Harvey, Strange Newes (1592) and Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596). If Harvey is to be credited, Nashe was a hack for the printer John Danter in 1593. The controversy was terminated in 1599, when the archbishop of Canterbury ordered that “all Nasshes bookes and Doctor Harveyes bookes be taken wheresoever they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter.”

Apparently Nashe wrote Strange Newes while he was living at the home of Sir George Carey, who momentarily relieved his oppressive poverty. In Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), Nashe warned his countrymen during one of the country's worst outbreaks of bubonic plague that, unless they reformed, London would suffer the fate of Jerusalem. The Terrors of the Night (1594) is a discursive, sometimes bewildering, attack on demonology.

Pierce Penilesse excepted, Nashe's most successful works were his entertainment Summers Last Will and Testament (1592, published 1600); his picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke Wilton; Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594; with Christopher Marlowe); and Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599). The Unfortunate Traveller is a brutal and realistic tale of adventure narrated with speed and economy. The book describes the travels through Germany and Italy of its rogue hero, Jacke Wilton, who lives by his wits and witnesses all sorts of historic events before he is converted to a better way of life. Lenten Stuffe, in praise of herrings, contains a charming description of the town of Yarmouth, Norfolk, a herring fishery. Nashe retreated to Yarmouth when he and Ben Jonson were prosecuted as a result of their satirical play The Isle of Dogs (1597).

Nashe was the first of the English prose eccentrics, an extraordinary inventor of verbal hybrids. The Works were edited by R.B. McKerrow, 5 vol. (1904–10; reprinted and reedited by F.P. Wilson, 1958).

George Peele, born , c. July 25, 1556, London, Eng., died , c. Nov. 9, 1596

Elizabethan dramatist who experimented in many forms of theatrical art: pastoral, history, melodrama, tragedy, folk play, and pageant. Peele's father was a London clerk who contributed to several city pageants. Peele was educated at Oxford, where he translated into English a play by Euripides. He later moved to London, but in 1583 he returned to Oxford to supervise the performance at Christ Church of two Latin plays by the noted academic dramatist William Gager (1555–1622).

In London he became associated with Robert Greene and others known as the university wits, who were attempting to make a living as professional authors, and he experimented with poetry in various forms. His earliest important work is The Arraignment of Paris (c. 1581–84), a mythological extravaganza written for the Children of the Chapel, a troupe of boy actors, and performed at court before Queen Elizabeth.

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The remainder of his career was devoted to writing plays for the popular stage, only four of which survive: a tragedy, The Battle of Alcazar (c. 1589); a chronicle history, Edward I (c. 1593); a biblical tragedy, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1594); and his most enduring achievement, the fantastical comic romance The Old Wives' Tale (c. 1591–94). He also wrote commemorative poems and city pageants.

Thomas Kyd, baptized Nov. 6, 1558, London, Eng., died c. December 1594, London

English dramatist who, with his The Spanish Tragedie (sometimes called Hieronimo, or Jeronimo, after its protagonist), initiated the revenge tragedy of his day. Kyd anticipated the structure of many later plays, including the development of middle and final climaxes. In addition, he revealed an instinctive sense of tragic situation, while his characterization of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedie prepared the way for Shakespeare's psychological study of Hamlet.

The son of a scrivener, Kyd was educated at the Merchant Taylors School in London. There is no evidence that he attended the university before turning to literature. He seems to have been in service for some years with a lord (possibly Ferdinando, Lord Strange, the patron of Lord Strange's Men). The Spanish Tragedie was entered in the Stationers' Register in October 1592, and the undated first quarto edition almost certainly appeared in that year. It is not known which company first played it, nor when; but Strange's company played Hieronimo 16 times in 1592, and the Admiral's Men revived it in 1597, as apparently did the Chamberlain's Men. It remained one of the most popular plays of the age and was often reprinted.

The only other play certainly by Kyd is Cornelia (1594), an essay in Senecan tragedy, translated from the French of Robert Garnier's academic Cornélie. He may also have written an earlier version of Hamlet, known to scholars as the Ur-Hamlet, and his hand has sometimes been detected in the anonymous Arden of Feversham, one of the first domestic tragedies, and in a number of other plays.

About 1591 Kyd was sharing lodgings with Christopher Marlowe, and on May 13, 1593, he was arrested and then tortured, being suspected of treasonable activity. His room had been searched and certain “atheistical” disputations denying the deity of Jesus Christ found there. He probably averred then and certainly confirmed later, in a letter, that these papers had belonged to Marlowe. That letter is the source for almost everything that is known about Kyd's life. He was dead by Dec. 30, 1594, when his mother made a formal repudiation of her son's debt-ridden estate.

John Lyly, born 1554?, Kent, Eng., died November 1606, London

author considered to be the first English prose stylist to leave an enduring impression upon the language. As a playwright he also contributed to the development of prose dialogue in English comedy.

Lyly was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went to London about 1576. There he gained fame with the publication of two prose romances, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580), which together made him the most fashionable English writer of the 1580s. Euphues is a romantic intrigue told in letters interspersed with general discussions on such topics as religion, love, and epistolary style. Lyly's preoccupation

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with the exact arrangement and selection of words, his frequent use of similes drawn from classical mythology, and his artificial and excessively elegant prose inspired a short-lived Elizabethan literary style called “euphuism.” The Euphues novels introduced a new concern with form into English prose.

After 1580 Lyly devoted himself almost entirely to writing comedies. In 1583 he gained control of the first Blackfriars Theatre, in which his earliest plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, were produced. All of Lyly's comedies except The Woman in the Moon were presented by the Children of Paul's, a children's company that was periodically favoured by Queen Elizabeth. The performance dates of his plays are as follows: Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, 1583–84; Gallathea, 1585–88; Endimion, 1588; Midas, 1589; Love's Metamorphosis, 1590; Mother Bombie, 1590; and The Woman in the Moon, 1595. All but one of these are in prose. The finest is considered to be Endimion, which some critics hold a masterpiece.

Lyly's comedies mark an enormous advance upon those of his predecessors in English drama. Their plots are drawn from classical mythology and legend, and their characters engage in euphuistic speeches redolent of Renaissance pedantry; but the charm and wit of the dialogues and the light and skillful construction of the plots set standards that younger and more gifted dramatists could not ignore.

Lyly's popularity waned with the rise of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, and his appeals to Queen Elizabeth for financial relief went unheeded. He had hoped to succeed Edmund Tilney in the court post of Master of the Revels, but Tilney outlived him, and Lyly died a poor and bitter man.

CONCLUSION

Shortly after 400 bc dramatists turned from the social and political concerns of Old Comedy to mythological burlesque or, more often, to amusing plays of everyday life. No complete examples of these plays have survived. In the 330s bc this so-called Middle Comedy gave way to New Comedy, which dealt primarily with the Athenian middle class. The only complete surviving example is Dyskolos (317 bc; The Curmudgeon) by Menander. The title character is a common type in such plays, an old man opposing the union of sympathetic young lovers who finally triumph, aided by a clever servant. This comic structure was later taken up by the Roman comic dramatists Plautus, in Aulularia (200? bc; The Pot of Gold) and other plays, and Terence, in Adelphoe (160 bc; The Brothers), for example. Through their influence it became one of the most familiar models of comedy. Almost all of the surviving Roman tragedies are by the philosopher Seneca. Although they were probably not performed in his own time, they later played an important role in shaping Renaissance tragedy and neoclassic tragedy of 17th-century France (for more information, see the Renaissance Drama section of this article).

The tradition of classical drama disappeared with the end of the Roman Empire in the 5th century ad, and after almost 400 years a new tradition grew out of the rituals of the medieval Christian church. Certain sung passages from the liturgy were elaborated into short dialogues based on passages from the Bible, and these dramas, performed only in churches and monasteries, spread throughout Europe from the 10th to the 13th centuries. Around 1200

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these plays began to be performed outdoors, and between then and 1350 they became more and more elaborate in size, subject matter, and physical staging. Instead of single biblical scenes or stories, they often included several stories. In England religious plays presented major events from the entire Bible in long cycles, from the creation of the world to the last judgment. Although still sponsored, written, and organized by church authorities, they involved entire communities in their staging and performance, which sometimes continued for several days.

In France, plays based on the lives and legends of saints rivaled biblical dramas in popularity. Some scholars have called these miracle plays, because they depict the miracles performed by saints, and have termed the plays based on the Bible mystery plays (from mysterium, Latin for “service” or “office,” referring to the members of trade guilds who often performed them). But the terms are often used interchangeably today. Another popular type of religious drama from the 14th century onward was the morality play, which taught religious lessons using allegorical characters such as Good Deeds, Riches, or Vice. The most famous morality play is Everyman (1500?), which describes Everyman's encounter with Death. See Miracle, Mystery, and Morality Plays.

Not all medieval drama was religious. Many secular plays have survived from the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Most common are short farces—rather crude and earthy pieces designed only to stimulate laughter. Often they involve pranks and trickery, as in the most famous of the plays, Pierre Pathelin (1470?) from France. The oldest surviving secular play, Le jeu de la feuillée (The Play of the Greensward, 1276) by French poet and composer Adam de la Halle, mixes elements from folktales and fairy tales. His later Jeu de Robin et Marion (1283?; The Play of Robin and Marion), with its songs and dances, has sometimes been called the first comic opera.

Still other dramatic activities developed in late medieval royal courts. Tournaments—originally contests among knights—and court costume parties called mummings or disguisings gradually became more symbolic and elaborate. With the addition of scenery and scripts the mummings became the court masques of the Renaissance, which featured poetry, music, and dance, and told allegorical or mythical stories.

Music of the Renaissance Theater During the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century), a rebirth of attention to art and intellectual pursuits paralleled a movement to restore philosophical and artistic ideals of classical antiquity. The spirit of this time is often reflected in secular songs and consort music. This was also a time when music became more integral to artistic and literary life. English playwright William Shakespeare used music in the form of popular songs and well-known ballads in his plays. His verses inspired numerous composers of songs and dramatic orchestral music."Greensleeves" performed by the Deller Consort, from Shakespeare Songs.

Shakespeare's Macbeth William Shakespeare, who wrote during the late 1500s and early 1600s in England, is generally considered the greatest dramatist in human history and the supreme poet of the English language. His brilliant works are universally celebrated for their comprehensive understanding of the human condition. In this excerpt from William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth (recited by an actor), Macbeth meditates on the futility of human endeavors. Macbeth’s schemes for gaining power are falling apart, and he has just heard that Lady Macbeth is dead.(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved./Culver Pictures

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While medieval culture and drama still flourished in northern Europe in the 15th and early 16th centuries, a revival of interest in the learning and culture of classical Greece and Rome took place in Italy, ushering in the Renaissance. Roman drama had been studied as literature throughout the Middle Ages, but in the schools and universities of Italy a new interest developed in performing these dramas and creating modern imitations of them. This interest received encouragement from aristocratic families such as the Medici, who supported Renaissance painters and musicians and saw in drama another art that could add to the glory of their courts. Even the greatest artists of the Renaissance participated in elaborate stagings of classical revivals and modern imitations.

During the 15th century, the Italian interest in classical drama and modern versions spread, contributing to one of the greatest eras of dramatic writing in Spain, France, and England. Despite the enormous influence of the Italian drama during this period, few plays from the Italian Renaissance are still read or performed today. The best known of these few is Mandragola (1524; The Mandrake), a satire on Italian society of the time by statesman and historian Niccolò Machiavelli.

Along with an interest in classical drama itself came an equal interest in the theory and analysis of this drama. Renaissance literary theorists in Italy undertook close studies of the commentaries of Horace and Aristotle on drama and devoted a major part of their work to analysis of these writings. This so-called neoclassic theory had perhaps an even wider readership and a greater influence throughout Europe than the Italian plays themselves, which also were termed neoclassic. Dramatists in England, Spain, and particularly France looked to Renaissance Italian theorists such as Francesco Robertello or Julius Caesar Scaliger to provide them with precise instructions on the proper way of writing a play. Among the most influential of these rules were those that demanded strict separation of comedy and tragedy, a moral function for theater, and the three unities of time, place, and action. The three unities required that the events of a play not exceed a single day (time), be confined to a single location or to several locations within a small area (place), and not have subplots (action).

From the beginning, the strict regulations of neoclassic dramatic theory met with some resistance, especially from playwrights. Italian poet Battista Guarini, for instance, argued for the development of a new genre, the tragicomedy, that would combine elements from these two traditional genres. The example he created, Il pastor fido (1589; The Faithful Shepherd, 1647), enjoyed great international success. It also helped to establish the pastoral, a play that dealt with the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses, as a major type of Renaissance drama. The degree to which strict neoclassic theory shaped Renaissance drama varied from country to country. The French eventually subscribed to it almost totally, whereas major English dramatists such as Shakespeare gave it little attention. The theory remained a powerful guide for most European playwrights until the early 19th century, when the movement known as romanticism arose. In the theater, romanticism was in large part a rejection of the whole framework of neoclassic theory, in favor of a freer and more open dramatic structure similar to that represented by Shakespeare.

Commedia Dell'arte Masks The masks in this painting are known as half masks. They were worn by players in the Italian commedia dell’arte, which was popular in the 16th century. The characters portrayed in commedia dell’arte were always very exaggerated. The masks were designed to contribute to these exaggerations.Art Resource, NY/Scala

Monteverdi’s Orfeo Orfeo (1607), by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, is regarded as the first modern opera. In this work Monteverdi took the declamatory singing style called

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monody, which had given rise to opera around 1600, and added a variety of musical and instrumental settings. Monody emphasized flexible, natural text declamation to a simple instrumental accompaniment; this passage, “Tu se’ morta” (“You are dead”), is sung by Orfeo when he learns of his lover’s death."Tu se' morta from L'Orfeo" by Claudio Monteverdi, performed by Concerto Vocale, from Monteverdi: L'Orfeo (Cat.# Harmonia Mundi HMC 901553.54) (p)1995 Harmonia Mundi. All rights reserved.

Classical scholars in Italy were aware that Greek tragedies had musical accompaniment, dealt with mythological subjects, and featured solo singers and choruses, and they attempted to recreate this form in the late 16th century. Their experiments led instead to a new genre, the opera. The first major opera was Orfeo (Orpheus, 1607) by composer Claudio Monteverdi. Opera remained an entertainment of the Italian nobility and intellectual circles until 1637, when the first public opera house opened in Venice. Its success was so great that opera soon spread throughout Italy and then to the rest of Europe.

Italy's other major contribution to Renaissance theater in Europe was the commedia dell'arte. The name, meaning comedy of professional players (literally, “comedy of art”), distinguished it from the commedia erudita, or academic comedy, a form of literary comedy created and presented by amateur actors at courts of the nobility and at academies of learning. Unlike the commedia erudita, the commedia dell'arte had no written script, only an outline scenario around which the actors wove improvised sequences with comic routines, called lazzi, and previously memorized set speeches. Written descriptions of the commedia dell'arte begin to appear about 1550. Although its origins are unknown, various scholars have suggested that it may have developed from classic Roman comedies or farces or from late-medieval farce. A likely contributor was playwright Angelo Beolco of Venice, who created a whole series of farces in the early 1500s based on a wily peasant named Ruzzante. The commedia dell'arte utilized stock characters, like Ruzzante, so that actors performed the same character in play after play. Each commedia company had one or two pairs of young lovers and several more exaggerated roles that were divided into masters and servants and performed in masks. The most familiar masters were the boastful Captain, the incompetent Doctor, and the foolish old merchant Pantalone. The servants were much more varied, though many scripts called for a clever and a foolish one, a tradition that is still often followed in clowning. Today, the best known of the commedia servants is the witty and cunning Harlequin.

Romeo and Juliet, Balcony Scene In the famous balcony scene from the tragedy Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Juliet Capulet emerges from her bedroom to muse upon the young man she has just met and fallen in love with, Romeo Montague. He, much taken with her, overhears her thoughts with pleasure while hidden below. A long-standing feud between the Capulets and Montagues keeps the young lovers apart.Courtesy of BBC Worldwide Americas, Inc. All rights reserved. A Midsummer Night’s Dream Fairies emerge from doorways in space, and Bottom’s bed hangs suspended before the moon in this 1998 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. The set, lighting, staging, and costumes all combine to intensify the play’s enchanted, unreal atmosphere.Oregon Shakespeare Festival/David Cooper

Christopher Marlowe, considered the greatest English dramatist before William Shakespeare, greatly advanced tragedy as an English dramatic form. He was also the first English playwright to compose in blank verse.The New York Public Library

Hamlet’s Soliloquy, Act III In this excerpt from the tragic play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet reveals that his self-doubt and inability to avenge his father’s death have

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led him to the brink of suicide. A British actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company recites the well-known soliloquy “To Be or Not to Be.”"'To Be or Not To Be' from Hamlet" written by William Shakespeare, performed by Simon Russell Beale, from Great Speeches and Soliloquies (Cat.# Naxos NA201512) ©and(p)1994 Naxos Audiobooks Ltd. Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. www.naxos.com. All Rights Reserved.

The Italian enthusiasm for imitating and reviving classical drama and for formulating elaborate rules for its creation gradually spread throughout Europe, but with very different results in different countries. English schools and universities embraced the new Italian ideas avidly in the mid-16th century. By the end of that century, however, classical dramatic practice had merged with medieval theater practices and various popular traditions to create a complex new kind of drama in England. This form culminated in the work of the most famous dramatist of all time, William Shakespeare.

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