Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Drama" to "Dublin"
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Title: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Drama" to "Dublin"
Author: Various
Release date: June 11, 2010 [eBook #32783]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32783
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Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's notes:
(1) Numbers following letters (without space) like C2 were originally
printed in subscript. Letter subsctipts are preceded by an
underscore, like C_n.
(2) Characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript.
(3) Side-notes were relocated to function as titles of their respective
paragraphs.
(4) Letters topped by Macron are represented as [=x].
(5) Letters with a dot below are represented as [x.].
(6) The following typographical errors have been corrected:
Article DRAMA: "Incomparably the most important of recent additions
to the literary drama is Thomas Hardy's vast panorama of the
Napoleonic wars, entitled The Dynasts (1904-1908)." 'Incomparably'
amended from 'Imcomparably'.
Article DRAVIDIAN: "Their languages form an isolated group, and it
has not been possible to prove a connexion with any other family of
languages." 'form' amended from 'from'.
Article DRAWING: "The same analogy may be observed between two of
the senses in which the French verb tirer is frequently employed."
'French' amended from 'Frech'.
Article DRAWING: "Although the modern Italians have both traire and
trarre, they use delineare still in the sense of artistic drawing,
and also adombrare." 'in' amended from 'is'.
Article DREDGE and DREDGING: "... the illustration of the
geographical distribution of marine animals, and the more accurate
determination of the fossils of the Pliocene period."
'illustration' amended from 'illlustration'.
Article DRENTE: "... and in 1818 the Society of Charity
(Maatschappij van Weldadigheid) was formed with Count van den Bosch
at its head." 'Weldadigheid' amended from 'Weldadigkeid'.
Article DRENTE: "In later times forest culture was added, and the
Gerard Adriaan van Swieten schools of forestry, agriculture and
horticulture were established by Major van Swieten in memory of his
son." 'Swieten' amended from 'Sweiten'.
Article DREW: "From 1861 to 1892 she had the management of the Arch
Street theatre in Philadelphia." 'From' amended from 'Fom'.
Article DRIFT: "Thus it is possible to speak of a snow-drift, an
accumulation driven by the wind; of a ship drifting out of its
course; of the drift of a speech, i.e. its general tendency."
'accumulation' amended from 'accumlation'.
Article DUBLIN: "But the old jealousy arose in the reign of George
I., and in the reign of George III." 'jealousy' amended from
'jealously'.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE
AND GENERAL INFORMATION
ELEVENTH EDITION
VOLUME VIII, SLICE VII
Drama to Dublin
ARTICLES IN THIS SLICE:
DRAMA (part) DRONFIELD
DRAMBURG DROPSY
DRAMMEN DROPWORT
DRANE, AUGUSTA THEODOSIA DROSHKY
DRAPER, JOHN WILLIAM DROSTE-HÜLSHOFF, ANNETTE ELISABETH
DRAPER DROSTE-VISCHERING, CLEMENS AUGUST
DRAUGHT DROUAIS, JEAN GERMAIN
DRAUGHTS DROUET, JEAN BAPTISTE
DRAUPADI DROWNING AND LIFE SAVING
DRAVE DROYSEN, JOHANN GUSTAV
DRAVIDIAN DROZ, ANTOINE GUSTAVE
DRAWBACK DROZ, FRANÇOIS-XAVIER JOSEPH
DRAWING DRUG (district of British India)
DRAWING AND QUARTERIN DRUG (medicine)
DRAWING-ROOM DRUIDISM
DRAYTON, MICHAEL DRUIDS, ORDER OF
DREAM DRUM
DREDGE and DREDGING DRUMMOND, HENRY (1786-1860)
DRELINCOURT, CHARLES DRUMMOND, HENRY (1851-1897)
DRENTE DRUMMOND, THOMAS
DRESDEN DRUMMOND, WILLIAM
DRESS DRUNKENNESS
DRESSER DRURY, SIR WILLIAM
DREUX DRUSES
DREW DRUSIUS JOHANNES
DREW, SAMUEL DRUSUS, MARCUS LIVIUS
DREWENZ DRUSUS, NERO CLAUDIUS
DREXEL, ANTHONY JOSEPH DRUSUS CAESAR
DREYFUS, ALFRED DRYADES
DRIBURG DRYANDER, JONAS
DRIFFIELD DRYBURGH ABBEY
DRIFT DRYDEN, JOHN
DRILL DRYOPITHECUS
DRINKING VESSELS DRY ROT
DRIPSTONE DUALISM
DRISLER, HENRY DUALLA
DRIVER, SAMUEL ROLLES DU BARRY, MARIE JEANNE BÉCU
DRIVING DU BARTAS, GUILLAUME DE SALUSTE
DROGHEDA DUBAWNT
DROIT DUBBO
DROITWICH DU BELLAY, GUILLAUME
DRÔME DU BELLAY, JEAN
DROMEDARY DU BELLAY, JOACHIM
DROMORE DUBLIN (county of Ireland)
DROMOS DUBLIN (city of Ireland)
DRONE
DRAMA. (Continued from Volume 8 Slice 6.)
10. MEDIEVAL DRAMA
Ecclesiastical and monastic literary drama.
Hrosvitha.
While the scattered and persecuted strollers thus kept alive something
of the popularity, if not of the loftier traditions, of their art,
neither, on the other hand, was there an utter absence of written
compositions to bridge the gap between ancient and modern dramatic
literature. In the midst of the condemnation with which the Christian
Church visited the stage, its professors and votaries, we find
individual ecclesiastics resorting in their writings to both the tragic
and the comic form of the ancient drama. These isolated productions,
which include the [Greek: Christos paschôn] (_Passion of Christ_)
formerly attributed to St Gregory Nazianzen, and the _Querolus_, long
fathered upon Plautus himself, were doubtless mostly written for
educational purposes--whether Euripides and Lycophron, or Menander,
Plautus and Terence, served as the outward models. The same was probably
the design of the famous "comedies" of Hrosvitha, the Benedictine nun of
Gandersheim, in Eastphalian Saxony, which associate themselves in the
history of Christian literature with the spiritual revival of the 10th
century in the days of Otto the Great. While avowedly imitated in form
from the comedies of Terence, these religious exercises derive their
themes--martyrdoms,[1] and miraculous or otherwise startling
conversions[2]--from the legends of Christian saints. Thus, from perhaps
the 9th to the 12th centuries, Germany and France, and through the
latter, by means of the Norman Conquest, England, became acquainted with
what may be called the literary monastic drama. It was no doubt
occasionally performed by the children under the care of monks or nuns,
or by the religious themselves; an exhibition of the former kind was
that of the _Play of St Katharine_, acted at Dunstable about the year
1110 in "copes" by the scholars of the Norman Geoffrey, afterwards abbot
of St Albans. Nothing is known concerning it except the fact of its
performance, which was certainly not regarded as a novelty.
The joculatores, jongleurs, minstrels.
These efforts of the cloister came in time to blend themselves with more
popular forms of the early medieval drama. The natural agents in the
transmission of these popular forms were those _mimes_, whom, while the
representatives of more elaborate developments, the "pantomimes" in
particular, had inevitably succumbed, the Roman drama had left surviving
it, unextinguished and unextinguishable. Above all, it is necessary to
point out how in the long interval now in question--the "dark ages,"
which may, from the present point of view, be reckoned from about the
6th to the 11th century--the Latin and the Teutonic elements of what may
be broadly designated as medieval "minstrelsy," more or less
imperceptibly, coalesced. The traditions of the disestablished and
disendowed _mimus_ combined with the "occupation" of the Teutonic
_scôp_, who as a professional personage does not occur in the earliest
Teutonic poetry, but on the other hand is very distinctly traceable
under this name or that of the "gleeman," in Anglo-Saxon literature,
before it fell under the control of the Christian Church. Her influence
and that of docile rulers, both in England and in the far wider area of
the Frank empire, gradually prevailed even over the inherited goodwill
which neither Alfred nor even Charles the Great had denied to the
composite growth in which _mimus_ and _scôp_ alike had a share.
How far the _joculatores_--which in the early middle ages came to be the
name most widely given to these irresponsible transmitters of a great
artistic trust--kept alive the usage of entertainments more essentially
dramatic than the minor varieties of their performances, we cannot say.
In different countries these entertainers suited themselves to different
tastes, and with the rise of native literatures to different literary
tendencies. The literature of the _troubadours_ of Provence, which
communicated itself to Spain and Italy, came only into isolated contact
with the beginnings of the religious drama; in northern France the
_jongleurs_, as the _joculatores_ were now called, were confounded with
the _trouvères_, who, to the accompaniment of _vielle_ or harp, sang the
_chansons de geste_ commemorative of deeds of war. As appointed servants
of particular households they were here, and afterwards in England,
called _menestrels_ (from _ministeriales_) or _minstrels_. Such a
_histrio_ or _mimus_ (as he is called) was Taillefer, who rode first
into the fight at Hastings, singing his songs of Roland and Charlemagne,
and tossing his sword in the air and catching it again. In England such
accomplished minstrels easily outshone the less versatile gleemen of
pre-Norman times, and one or two of them appeared as landholders in
Domesday Book, and many enjoyed the favour of the Norman, Angevin and
Plantagenet kings. But here, as elsewhere, the humbler members of the
craft spent their lives in strolling from castle to convent, from
village-green to city-street, and there exhibiting their skill as
dancers, tumblers, jugglers proper, and as masquers and conductors of
bears and other dumb contributors to popular wonder and merriment. Their
only chance of survival finally came to lie in organization under the
protection of powerful nobles; but when, in the 15th century in England,
companies of players issued forth from towns and villages, the
profession, in so far as its members had not secured preference, saw
itself threatened with ruin.
Survivals and adaptations of pagan festive ceremonies and usages.
In any attempt to explain the transmission of dramatic elements from
pagan to Christian times, and the influence exercised by this
transmission upon the beginnings of the medieval drama, account should
finally be taken of the pertinacious survival of popular festive rites
and ceremonies. From the days of Gregory the Great, i.e. from the end of
the 6th century onwards, the Western Church tolerated and even attracted
to her own festivals popular customs, significant of rejoicing, which
were in truth relics of heathen ritual. Such were the Mithraic feast of
the 25th of December, or the egg of Eostre-tide, and a multitude of
Celtic or Teutonic agricultural ceremonies. These rites, originally
symbolical of propitiation or of weather-magic, were of a semi-dramatic
nature--such as the dipping of the neck of corn in water, sprinkling
holy drops upon persons or animals, processions of beasts or men in
beast-masks, dressing trees with flowers, and the like, but above all
ceremonial dances, often in disguise. The sword-dance, recorded by
Tacitus, of which an important feature was the symbolic threat of death
to a victim, endured (though it is rarely mentioned) to the later middle
ages. By this time it had attracted to itself a variety of additional
features, and of characters familiar as pace-eggers, mummers,
morris-dancers (probably of distinct origin), who continually enlarged
the scope of their performances, especially as regarded their comic
element. The dramatic "expulsion of death," or winter, by the
destruction of a lay-figure--common through western Europe about the 8th
century--seems connected with a more elaborate rite, in which a
disguised performer (who perhaps originally represented summer) was
slain and afterwards revived (the _Pfingstl_, Jack in the Green, or
Green Knight). This representation, after acquiring a comic complexion,
was annexed by the character dancers, who about the 15th century took to
adding still livelier incidents from songs treating of popular heroes,
such as St George and Robin Hood; which latter found a place in the
festivities of May Day with their central figure, the May Queen. The
earliest ceremonial observances of this sort were clearly connected with
pastoral and agricultural life; but the inhabitants of the towns also
came to have a share in them; and so, as will be seen later, did the
clergy. They were in particular responsible for the buffooneries of the
feast of fools (or asses), which enjoyed the greatest popularity in
France (though protests against it are on record from the 11th century
onwards to the 17th), but was well known from London to Constantinople.
This riotous New Year's celebration was probably derived from the
ancient Kalend feasts, which may have bequeathed to it both the
hobby-horse and the lord, or bishop, of misrule. In the 16th century the
feast of fools was combined with the elaborate festivities of courts and
cities during the twelve Christmas feast-days--the season when
throughout the previous two centuries the "mummers" especially
flourished, who in their disguisings and "_viseres_" began as dancers
gesticulating in dumb-show, but ultimately developed into actors proper.
The liturgy the main source of the medieval religious drama.
Tropes.
Thus the literary and the professional element, as well as that of
popular festive usages, had survived to become tributaries to the main
stream of the early Christian drama, which had its direct source in the
liturgy of the Church itself. The service of the Mass contains in itself
dramatic elements, and combines with the reading out of portions of
Scripture by the priest--its "epical" part--a "lyrical" part in the
anthems and responses of the congregation. At a very early
period--certainly already in the 5th century--it was usual on special
occasions to increase the attractions of public worship by living
pictures, illustrating the Gospel narrative and accompanied by songs;
and thus a certain amount of action gradually introduced itself into the
service. The insertion, before or after sung portions of the service, of
tropes, originally one or more verses of texts, usually serving as
introits and in connexion with the gospel of the day, and recited by the
two halves of the choir, naturally led to dialogue chanting; and this
was frequently accompanied by illustrative fragments of action, such as
drawing down the veil from before the altar.
The liturgical mystery.
This practice of interpolations in the offices of the church, which is
attested by texts from the 9th century onwards (the so-called
"Winchester tropes" belong to the 10th and 11th), progressed, till on
the great festivals of the church the epical part of the liturgy was
systematically connected with spectacular and in some measure mimical
adjuncts, the lyrical accompaniment being of course retained. Thus the
_liturgical mystery_--the earliest form of the Christian drama--was
gradually called into existence. This had certainly been accomplished as
early as the 10th century, when on great ecclesiastical festivals it was
customary for the priests to perform in the churches these offices (as
they were called). The whole Easter story, from the burial to Emmaus,
was thus presented, the Maries and the angel adding their lyrical
_planctus_; while the surroundings of the Nativity--the Shepherds, the
Innocents, &c.--were linked with the Shepherds of Epiphany by a
recitation of "Prophets," including Vergil and the Sibyl. Before long,
from the 11th century onwards, _mysteries_, as they were called, were
produced in France on scriptural subjects unconnected with the great
Church festivals--such as the Wise and Foolish Virgins, Adam (with the
fall of Lucifer), Daniel, Lazarus, &c. Compositions on the last-named
two themes remain from the hand of one of the very earliest of medieval
play-writers, Hilarius, who may have been an Englishman, and who
certainly studied under Abelard. He also wrote a "miracle" of St
Nicholas, one of the most widely popular of medieval saints. Into the
pieces founded on the Scripture narrative outside characters and
incidents were occasionally introduced, by way of diverting the
audience.
The collective mystery.
These mysteries and miracles being as yet represented by the clergy
only, the language in which they were usually written is Latin--in many
varieties of verse with occasional prose; but already in the 11th
century the further step was taken of composing these texts in the
vernacular--the earliest example being the mystery of the Resurrection.
In time a whole series of mysteries was joined together; a process which
was at first roughly and then more elaborately pursued in France and
elsewhere, and finally resulted in the _collective mystery_--merely a
scholars' term of course, but one to which the principal examples of the
English mystery-drama correspond.
Mysteries, miracles, and morals distinguished.
The productions of the medieval religious drama it is usual technically
to divide into three classes. The _mysteries_ proper deal with
scriptural events only, their purpose being to set forth, with the aid
of the prophetic or preparatory history of the Old Testament, and more
especially of the fulfilling events of the New, the central mystery of
the Redemption of the world, as accomplished by the Nativity, the
Passion and the Resurrection. But in fact these were not kept
distinctly apart from the _miracle-plays_, or _miracles_, which are
strictly speaking concerned with the legends of the saints of the
church; and in England the name _mysteries_ was not in use. Of these
species the miracles must more especially have been fed from the
resources of the monastic literary drama. Thirdly, the _moralities_, or
_moral-plays_, teach and illustrate the same truths--not, however, by
direct representation of scriptural or legendary events and personages,
but allegorically, their characters being personified virtues or
qualities. Of the moralities the Norman _trouvères_ had been the
inventors; and doubtless this innovation connects itself with the
endeavour, which in France had almost proved victorious by the end of
the 13th century, to emancipate dramatic performances from the control
of the church.
The clergy and the religious drama.
The attitude of the clergy towards the dramatic performances which had
arisen out of the elaboration of the services of the church, but soon
admitted elements from other sources, was not, and could not be,
uniform. As the plays grew longer, their paraphernalia more extensive,
and their spectators more numerous, they began to be represented outside
as well as inside the churches, at first in the churchyards, and the use
of the vulgar tongue came to be gradually preferred. A Beverley
Resurrection play (1220 c.) and some others are bilingual. Miracles were
less dependent on this connexion with the church services than mysteries
proper; and lay associations, gilds, and schools in particular, soon
began to act plays in honour of their patron saints in or near their own
halls. Lastly, as scenes and characters of a more or less trivial
description were admitted even into the plays acted or superintended by
the clergy, as some of these characters came to be depended on by the
audiences for conventional extravagance or fun, every new Herod seeking
to out-Herod his predecessor, and the devils and their chief asserting
themselves as indispensable favourites, the comic element in the
religious drama increased; and that drama itself, even where it remained
associated with the church, grew more and more profane. The endeavour to
sanctify the popular tastes to religious uses, which connects itself
with the institution of the great festival of Corpus Christi (1264,
confirmed 1311), when the symbol of the mystery of the Incarnation was
borne in solemn procession, led to the closer union of the dramatic
exhibitions (hence often called _processus_) with this and other
religious feasts; but it neither limited their range nor controlled
their development.
Progress of the medieval drama in Europe.
It is impossible to condense into a few sentences the extremely varied
history of the processes of transformation undergone by the medieval
drama in Europe during the two centuries--from about 1200 to about
1400--in which it ran a course of its own, and during the succeeding
period, in which it was only partially affected by the influence of the
Renaissance. A few typical phenomena may, however, be noted in the case
of the drama of each of the several chief countries of the West; where
the vernacular successfully supplanted Latin as the ordinary medium of
dramatic speech, where song was effectually ousted by recitation and
dialogue, and where finally, though the emancipation was on this head
nowhere absolute, the religious drama gave place to the secular.
France.
In France, where dramatic performances had never fallen entirely into
the hands of the clergy, the progress was speediest and most decided
towards forms approaching those of the modern drama. The earliest play
in the French tongue, however, the 12th-century _Adam_, supposed to have
been written by a Norman in England (as is a fragmentary _Résurrection_
of much the same date), still reveals its connexion with the liturgical
drama. Jean Bodel of Arras' miracle-play of _St Nicolas_ (before 1205)
is already the production of a secular author, probably designed for the
edification of some civic confraternity to which he belonged, and has
some realistic features. On the other hand, the _Theophilus_ of Rutebeuf
(d. c. 1280) treats its Faust-like theme, with which we meet again in
Low-German dramatic literature two centuries later, in a rather lifeless
form but in a highly religious spirit, and belongs to the cycle of
miracles of the Virgin of which examples abound throughout this period.
Easter or Passion plays were fully established in popular acceptance in
Paris as well as in other towns of France by the end of the 14th
century; and in 1402 the _Confrérie de la Passion_, who at first devoted
themselves exclusively to the performance of this species, obtained a
royal privilege for the purpose. These series of religious plays were
both extensive and elaborate; perhaps the most notable series (c. 1450)
is that by Arnoul Greban, who died as a canon of Le Mans, his native
town. Its revision, by Jean Michel, containing much illustrative detail
(first performed at Angers in 1486), was very popular. Still more
elaborate is the Rouen Christmas mystery of 1474, and the celebrated
_Mystère du vieil testament_, produced at Abbeville in 1458, and
performed at Paris in 1500. Most of the Provençal Christmas and Passion
plays date from the 14th century, as well as a miracle of St Agnes. The
miracles of saints were popular in all parts of France, and the
diversity of local colouring naturally imparted to these productions
contributed materially to the growth of the early French drama. The
miracles of Ste Geneviève and St Denis came directly home to the
inhabitants of Paris, as that of St Martin to the citizens of Tours;
while the early victories of St Louis over the English might claim a
national significance for the dramatic celebration of his deeds. The
local saints of Provence were in their turn honoured by miracles dating
from the 15th and 16th centuries.
It is less easy to trace the origins of the comic medieval drama in
France, connected as they are with an extraordinary variety of
associations for professional, pious and pleasurable purposes. The _ludi
inhonesti_ in which the students of a Paris college (Navarre) were in
1315 debarred from engaging cannot be proved to have been dramatic
performances; the earliest known secular plays presented by university
students in France were moralities, performed in 1426 and 1431. These
plays, depicting conflicts between opposing influences--and at bottom
the struggle between good and evil in the human soul--become more
frequent from about this time onwards. Now it is (at Rennes in 1439) the
contention between _Bien-avisé_ and _Mal-avisé_ (who at the close find
themselves respectively in charge of _Bonne-fin_ and _Male-fin_); now,
one between _l'homme juste_ and _l'homme mondain_; now, the contrasted
story of _Les Enfants de Maintenant_, who, however, is no abstraction,
but an honest baker with a wife called Mignotte. Political and social
problems are likewise treated; and the _Mystère du Concile de Bâle_--an
historical morality--dates back to 1432. But thought is taken even more
largely of the sufferings of the people than of the controversies of the
Church; and in 1507 we even meet with a hygienic or abstinence morality
(by N. de la Chesnaye) in which "Banquet" enters into a conspiracy with
"Apoplexy," "Epilepsy" and the whole regiment of diseases.
Long before this development of an artificial species had been
consummated--from the beginning of the 14th century onwards--the famous
fraternity or professional union of the Basoche (clerks of the Parlement
and the Châtelet) had been entrusted with the conduct of popular
festivals at Paris, in which, as of right, they took a prominent
personal share; and from a date unknown they had performed plays. But
after the _Confrérie de la Passion_ had been allowed to monopolize the
religious drama, the _basochiens_ had confined themselves to the
presentment of moralities and of farces (from Italian _farsa_, Latin
_farcita_), in which political satire had as a matter of course when
possible found a place. A third association, calling themselves the
_Enfans sans souci_, had, apparently also early in the 15th century,
acquired celebrity by their performances of short comic plays called
soties--in which, as it would seem, at first allegorical figures
ironically "played the fool," but which were probably before long not
very carefully kept distinct from the farces of the Basoche, and were
like these on occasion made to serve the purposes of State or of Church.
Other confraternities and associations readily took a leaf out of the
book of these devil-may-care good-fellows, and interwove their religious
and moral plays with comic scenes and characters from actual life, thus
becoming more and more free and secular in their dramatic methods, and
unconsciously preparing the transition to the regular drama.
The earliest example of a serious secular play known to have been
written in the French tongue is the _Estoire de Griseldis_ (1393); which
is in the style of the miracles of the Virgin, but is largely indebted
to Petrarch. The _Mystère du siege d'Orléans_, on the other hand,
written about half a century later, in the epic tediousness of its
manner comes near to a chronicle history, and interests us chiefly as
the earliest of many efforts to bring Joan of Arc on the stage. Jacques
Milet's celebrated mystery of the _Destruction de Troye la grant_ (1452)
seems to have been addressed to readers and not to hearers only. The
beginnings of the French regular comic drama are again more difficult to
extract from the copious literature of farces and soties, which, after
mingling actual types with abstract and allegorical figures, gradually
came to exclude all but the concrete personages; moreover, the large
majority of these productions in their extant form belong to a later
period than that now under consideration. But there is ample evidence
that the most famous of all medieval farces, the immortal _Maistre
Pierre Pathelin_ (otherwise _L'Avocat Pathelin_), was written before
1470 and acted by the _basochiens_; and we may conclude that this
delightful story of the biter bit, and the profession outwitted,
typifies a multitude of similar comic episodes of real life, dramatized
for the delectation of clerks, lawyers and students, and of all lovers
of laughter.
The Netherlands.
In the neighbouring Netherlands many Easter and Christmas mysteries are
noted from the middle of the 15th century, attesting the enduring
popularity of these religious plays; and with them the celebrated series
of the Seven Joys of Maria--of which the first is the Annunciation and
the seventh the Ascension. To about the same date belongs the small
group of the so-called _abele spelen_ (as who should say plays easily
managed), chiefly on chivalrous themes. Though allegorical figures are
already to be found in the Netherlands miracles of Mary, the species of
the moralities was specially cultivated during the great Burgundian
period of this century by the chambers or lodges of the _Rederijkers_
(rhetoricians)--the well-known civic associations which devoted
themselves to the cultivation of learned poetry and took an active share
in the festivals that formed one of the most characteristic features of
the life of the Low Countries. Among these moralities was that of
_Elckerlijk_ (printed 1495 and presumably by Peter Dorlandus), which
there is good reason for regarding as the original of one of the finest
of English moralities, _Everyman_.
Italy.
In Italy the liturgical drama must have run its course as elsewhere; but
the traces of it are few, and confined to the north-east. The collective
mystery, so common in other Western countries, is in Italian literature
represented by a single example only--a _Passione di Gesù Cristo_,
performed at Revello in Saluzzo in the 15th century; though there are
some traces of other cyclic dramas of the kind. The Italian religious
plays, called _figure_ when on Old, _vangeli_ when on New, Testament
subjects, and differing from those of northern Europe chiefly by the
less degree of coarseness in their comic characters, seem largely to
have sprung out of the development of the processional element in the
festivals of the Church. Besides such processions as that of the Three
Kings at Epiphany in Milan, there were the penitential processions and
songs (_laude_), which at Assisi, Perugia and elsewhere already
contained a dramatic element; and at Siena, Florence and other centres
these again developed into the so-called (_sacre_) _rappresentazioni_,
which became the most usual name for this kind of entertainment. Such a
piece was the _San Giovanni e San Paolo_ (1489), by Lorenzo the
Magnificent--the prince who afterwards sought to reform the Italian
stage by paganizing it; another was the _Santa Teodora_, by Luigi Pulci
(d. 1487); _San Giovanni Gualberto_ (of Florence) treats the religious
experience of a latter-day saint; _Rosana e Ulimento_ is a love-story
with a Christian moral. Passion plays were performed at Rome in the
Coliseum by the _Compagnia del Gonfalone_; but there is no evidence on
this head before the end of the 15th century. In general, the
spectacular magnificence of Italian theatrical displays accorded with
the growing pomp of the processions both ecclesiastical and lay--called
_trionfi_ already in the days of Dante; while the religious drama
gradually acquired an artificial character and elaboration of form
assimilating it to the classical attempts, to be noted below, which gave
rise to the regular Italian drama. The poetry of the Troubadours, which
had come from Provence into Italy, here frequently took a dramatic form,
and may have suggested some of his earlier poetic experiments to
Petrarch.
It was a matter of course that remnants of the ancient popular dramatic
entertainments should have survived in particular abundance on Italian
soil. They were to be recognized in the improvised farces performed at
the courts, in the churches (_farse spirituali_), and among the people;
the Roman carnival had preserved its wagon-plays, and various links
remained to connect the modern comic drama of the Italians with the
_Atellanes_ and _mimes_ of their ancestors. But the more notable later
comic developments, which belong to the 16th century, will be more
appropriately noticed below. Moralities proper had not flourished in
Italy, where the love of the concrete has always been dominant in
popular taste; more numerous are examples of scenes, largely
mythological, in which the influence of the Renaissance is already
perceptible, of eclogues, and of allegorical festival-plays of various
sorts.
Spain.
In Spain hardly a monument of the medieval religious drama has been
preserved. There is manuscript evidence of the 11th century attesting
the early addition of dramatic elements to the Easter office; and a
Spanish fragment of the Three Kings Epiphany play, dating from the 12th
century, is, like the French _Adam_, one of the very earliest examples
of the medieval drama in the vernacular. But that religious plays were
performed in Spain is clear from the permission granted by Alphonso X.
of Castile (d. 1284) to the clergy to represent them, while prohibiting
the performance by them of _juegos de escarnio_ (mocking plays). The
earliest Spanish plays which we possess belong to the end of the 15th or
beginning of the 16th century, and already show humanistic influence. In
1472 the couplets of _Mingo Revulgo_ (i.e. Domingo Vulgus, the common
people), and about the same time another dialogue by the same author,
offer examples of a sort resembling the Italian _contrasti_ (see below).
Germany.
The German religious plays in the vernacular, the earliest of which date
from the 14th and 15th centuries, and were produced at Trier,
Wolfenbuttel, Innsbruck, Vienna, Berlin, &c., were of a simple kind; but
in some of them, though they were written by clerks, there are traces of
the minstrels' hands. The earliest complete Christmas play in German,
contained in a 14th-century St Gallen MS., has nothing in it to suggest
a Latin original. On the other hand, the play of _The Wise and the
Foolish Virgins_, in a Thuringian MS. thought to be as early as 1328, a
piece of remarkable dignity, was evidently based on a Latin play. Other
festivals besides Christmas were celebrated by plays; but down to the
Reformation Easter enjoyed a preference. In the same century
miracle-plays began to be performed, in honour of St Catherine, St
Dorothea and other saints. But all these productions seem to belong to a
period when the drama was still under ecclesiastical control. Gradually,
as the liturgical drama returned to the simpler forms from which it had
so surprisingly expanded, and ultimately died out, the religious plays
performed outside the churches expanded more freely; and the type of
mystery associated with the name of the Frankfort canon Baldemar von
Peterweil communicated itself, with other examples, to the receptive
region of the south-west. The Corpus Christi plays, or (as they were here
called) _Frohnleichnamsspiele_, are notable, since that of Innsbruck
(1391) is probably the earliest extant example of its class. The number
of non-scriptural religious plays in Germany was much smaller than that
in France; but it may be noted that (in accordance with a long-enduring
popular notion) the theme of the last judgment was common in Germany in
the latter part of the middle ages. Of this theme _Antichrist_ may be
regarded as an episode, though in 1469 an _Antichrist_ appears to have
occupied at Frankfort four days in its performance. The earlier (12th
century) _Antichrist_ is a production quite unique of its kind; this
political protest breathes the Ghibelline spirit of the reign (Frederick
Barbarossa's) in which it was composed.
Though many of the early German plays contain an element of the
moralities, there were few representative German examples of the
species. The academical instinct, or some other influence, kept the more
elaborate productions on the whole apart from the drolleries of the
professional strollers (_fahrende Leute_), whose Shrove-Tuesday plays
(_Fastnachtsspiele_) and cognate productions reproduced the practical
fun of common life. Occasionally, no doubt, as in the Lübeck
_Fastnachtsspiel_ of the Five Virtues, the two species may have more or
less closely approached to one another. When, in the course of the 15th
century, Hans Rosenplüt, called Schnepperer--or Hans Schnepperer, called
Rosenplüt--the predecessor of Hans Sachs, first gave a more enduring
form to the popular Shrove-Tuesday plays, a connexion was already
establishing itself between the dramatic amusements of the people and
the literary efforts of the "master-singers" of the towns. But, while
the main productivity of the writers of moralities and cognate
productions--a species particularly suited to German latitudes--falls
into the periods of Renaissance and Reformation, the religious drama
proper survived far beyond either in Catholic Germany, and, in fact, was
not suppressed in Bavaria and Tirol till the end of the 18th century.[3]
Sweden, Carpathian lands, &c.
It may be added that the performance of miracle-plays is traceable in
Sweden in the latter half of the 14th century; and that the German
clerks and laymen who immigrated into the Carpathian lands, and into
Galicia in particular, in the later middle ages, brought with them their
religious plays together with other elements of culture. This fact is
the more striking, inasmuch as, though Czech Easter plays were performed
about the end of the 14th century, we hear of none among the Magyars, or
among their neighbours of the Eastern empire.
Religious drama in England.
Cornish miracle-plays.
Coming now to the English religious drama, we find that from its extant
literature a fair general idea may be derived of the character of these
medieval productions. The _miracle-plays_, _miracles_ or _plays_ (these
being the terms used in England) of which we hear in London in the 12th
century were probably written in Latin and acted by ecclesiastics; but
already in the following century mention is made--in the way of
prohibition--of plays acted by professional players. (Isolated
moralities of the 12th century are not to be regarded as popular
productions.) In England as elsewhere, the clergy either sought to
retain their control over the religious plays, which continued to be
occasionally acted in churches even after the Reformation, or else
reprobated them with or without qualifications. In Cornwall miracles in
the native Cymric dialect were performed at an early date; but those
which have been preserved are apparently copies of English (with the
occasional use of French) originals; they were represented, unlike the
English plays, in the open country, in extensive amphitheatres
constructed for the purpose--one of which, at St Just near Penzance, has
recently been restored.
Localities of the performance of miracle-plays.
The York, Towneley, Chester and Coventry plays.
The flourishing period of English miracle-plays begins with the practice
of their performance by trading-companies in the towns, though these
bodies were by no means possessed of any special privileges for the
purpose. Of this practice Chester is said to have set the example
(1268-1276); it was followed in the course of the 13th and 14th
centuries by many other towns, while in yet others traces of such
performances are not to be found till the 15th, or even the 16th. These
towns with their neighbourhoods include, starting from East Anglia,
where the religious drama was particularly at home, Wymondham, Norwich,
Sleaford, Lincoln, Leeds, Wakefield, Beverley, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne,
with a deviation across the border to Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In the
north-west they are found at Kendal, Lancaster, Preston, Chester;
whence they may be supposed to have migrated to Dublin. In the west they
are noticeable at Shrewsbury, Worcester and Tewkesbury; in the Midlands
at Coventry and Leicester; in the east at Cambridge and Bassingbourne,
Heybridge and Manningtree; to which places have to be added Reading,
Winchester, Canterbury, Bethesda and London, in which last the
performers were the parish-clerks. Four collections, in addition to some
single examples of such plays, have come down to us, the _York_ plays,
the so-called _Towneley_ plays, which were probably acted at the fairs
of Widkirk, near Wakefield, and those bearing the names of _Chester_ and
of _Coventry_. Their dates, in the forms in which they have come down to
us, are more or less uncertain; that of the _York_ may on the whole be
concluded to be earlier than that of the _Towneley_, which were probably
put together about the middle of the 14th century; the _Chester_ may be
ascribed to the close of the 14th or the earlier part of the 15th; the
body of the _Coventry_ probably belongs to the 15th or 16th. Many of the
individual plays in these collections were doubtless founded on French
originals; others are taken direct from Scripture, from the apocryphal
gospels, or from the legends of the saints. Their characteristic feature
is the combination of a whole series of plays into one _collective_
whole, exhibiting the entire course of Bible history from the creation
to the day of judgment. For this combination it is unnecessary to
suppose that they were generally indebted to foreign examples, though
there are several remarkable coincidences between the Chester plays and
the French _Mystère du vieil testament_. Indeed, the oldest of the
series--the _York_ plays--exhibits a fairly close parallel to the scheme
of the _Cursor mundi_, an epic poem of Northumbrian origin, which early
in the 14th century had set an example of treatment that unmistakably
influenced the collective mysteries as a whole. Among the isolated plays
of the same type which have come down to us may be mentioned _The
Harrowing of Hell_ (the Saviour's descent into hell), an East-Midland
production which professes to tell of "a strif of Jesu and of Satan" and
is probably the earliest dramatic, or all but dramatic, work in English
that has been preserved; and several belonging to a series known as the
_Digby Mysteries_, including _Parfre's Candlemas Day_ (the massacre of
the Innocents), and the very interesting miracle of _Mary Magdalene_. Of
the so-called "Paternoster" and "Creed" plays (which exhibit the
miraculous powers of portions of the Church service) no example remains,
though of some we have an account; the Croxton _Play of the Sacrament_,
the MS. of which is preserved at Dublin, and which seems to date from
the latter half of the 15th century, exhibits the triumph of the holy
wafer over wicked Jewish wiles.
English collective mysteries.
To return to the collective mysteries, as they present themselves to us
in the chief extant series. "The manner of these plays," we read in a
description of those at Chester, dating from the close of the 16th
century, "were:--Every company had his pageant, which pageants were a
high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In
the lower they apparelled themselves, and in the higher room they
played, being all open at the top, that all beholders might hear and see
them. The places where they played them was in every street. They began
first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was played, it was
wheeled to the high cross before the mayor, and so to every street, and
so every street had a pageant playing before them at one time till all
the pageants appointed for the day were played; and when one pageant was
near ended, word was brought from street to street, that so they might
come in place thereof, exceedingly orderly, and all the streets have
their pageants afore them all at one time playing together; to see which
plays was great resort, and also scaffolds and stages made in the
streets in those places where they determined to play their pageants."
Each play, then, was performed by the representative of a particular
trade or company, after whom it was called the fishers', glovers', &c.,
_pageant_; while a general prologue was spoken by a herald. As a rule
the movable stage sufficed for the action, though we find horsemen
riding up to the scaffold, and Herod instructed to "rage in the pagond
and in the strete also." There is no probability that the stage was, as
in France, divided into three platforms with a dark cavern at the side
of the lowest, appropriated respectively to the Heavenly Father and his
angels, to saints and glorified men, to mere men, and to souls in hell.
But the last-named locality was frequently displayed in the English
miracles, with or without fire in its mouth. The costumes were in part
conventional,--divine and saintly personages being distinguished by gilt
hair and beards, Herod being clad as a Saracen, the demons wearing
hideous heads, the souls black and white coats according to their kind,
and the angels gold skins and wings.
Character of the Plays.
Doubtless these performances abounded in what seem to us ludicrous
features; and, though their main purpose was serious, they were not in
England at least intended to be devoid of fun. But many of the features
in question are in truth only homely and _naïf_, and the simplicity of
feeling which they exhibit is at times pathetic rather than laughable.
The occasional grossness is due to an absence of refinement of taste
rather than to an obliquity of moral sentiment. These features the four
series have more or less in common, still there are certain obvious
distinctions between them. The _York_ plays (48), which were performed
at Corpus Christi, are comparatively free from the tendency to
jocularity and vulgarity observable in the _Towneley_; several of the
plays concerned with the New Testament and early Christian story are,
however, in substance common to both series. The _Towneley Plays_ or
_Wakefield Mysteries_ (32) were undoubtedly composed by the friars of
Widkirk or Nostel; but they are of a popular character; and, while
somewhat over-free in tone, are superior in vivacity and humour to both
the later collections. The _Chester Plays_ (25) were undoubtedly
indebted both to the _Mystère du vieil testament_ and to earlier French
mysteries; they are less popular in character than the earlier two
cycles, and on the whole undistinguished by original power of pathos or
humour. There is, on the other hand, a notable inner completeness in
this series, which includes a play of _Antichrist_, devoid of course of
any modern application. While these plays were performed at Whitsuntide,
the _Coventry Plays_ (42) were Corpus Christi performances. Though there
is no proof that the extant series were composed by the Grey Friars,
they reveal a considerable knowledge of ecclesiastical literature. For
the rest, they are far more effectively written than the _Chester
Plays_, and occasionally rise to real dramatic force. In the _Coventry_
series there is already to be observed an element of abstract figures,
which connects them with a different species of the medieval drama.
Moralities.
The Devil and the Vice.
The _moralities_ corresponded to the love for allegory which manifests
itself in so many periods of English literature, and which, while
dominating the whole field of medieval literature, was nowhere more
assiduously and effectively cultivated than in England. It is necessary
to bear this in mind, in order to understand what to us seems so
strange, the popularity of the moral-plays, which indeed never equalled
that of the miracles, but sufficed to maintain the former species till
it received a fresh impulse from the connexion established between it
and the "new learning," together with the new political and religious
ideas and questions, of the Reformation age. Moreover, a specially
popular element was supplied to these plays, which in manner of
representation differed in no essential point from the miracles, in a
character borrowed from the latter, and, in the moralities, usually
provided with a companion whose task it was to lighten the weight of
such abstractions as Sapience and Justice. These were the Devil and his
attendant the _Vice_, of whom the latter seems to have been of native
origin, and, as he was usually dressed in a fool's habit, was probably
suggested by the familiar custom of keeping an attendant fool at court
or in great houses. The Vice had many _aliases_ (_Shift_, _Ambidexter_,
_Sin_, _Fraud_, _Iniquity_, &c.), but his usual duty is to torment and
tease the Devil his master for the edification and diversion of the
audience. He was gradually blended with the domestic fool, who survived
in the regular drama. There are other concrete elements in the
moralities; for typical figures are often fitted with concrete names,
and thus all but converted into concrete human personages.
Groups of English moralities.
The earlier English moralities[4]--from the reign of Henry VI. to that
of Henry VII.--usually allegorize the conflict between good and evil in
the mind and life of man, without any side-intention of theological
controversy. Such also is still essentially the purpose of the extant
morality by Henry VIII.'s poet, the witty Skelton.[5] _Everyman_ (pr. c.
1529), perhaps the most perfect example of its class, with which the
present generation has fortunately become familiar, contains passages
certainly designed to enforce the specific teaching of Rome. But its
Dutch original was written at least a generation earlier, and could have
no controversial intention. On the other hand, R. Wever's _Lusty
Juventus_ breathes the spirit of the dogmatic reformation of the reign
of Edward VI. Theological controversy largely occupies the moralities of
the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign,[6] and connects itself with
political feeling in a famous morality, Sir David Lyndsay's _Satire of
the Three Estaitis_, written and acted (at Cupar, in 1539) on the other
side of the border, where such efforts as the religious drama proper had
made had been extinguished by the Reformation. Only a single English
political morality proper remains to us, which belongs to the beginning
of the reign of Elizabeth.[7] Another series connects itself with the
ideas of the Renaissance rather than the Reformation, treating of
intellectual progress rather than of moral conduct;[8] this extends from
the reign of Henry VIII. to that of his younger daughter. Besides these,
there remain some Elizabethan moralities which have no special
theological or scientific purpose, and which are none the less lively in
consequence.[9]
Transition from the morality to the regular drama.
Heywood's interludes.
The transition from the morality to the regular drama in England was
effected, on the one hand, by the intermixture of historical personages
with abstractions--as in Bishop Bale's _Kyng Johan_ (c. 1548)--which
easily led over to the _chronicle history_; on the other, by the
introduction of types of real life by the side of abstract figures. This
latter tendency, of which instances occur in earlier plays, is
observable in several of the 16th-century moralities;[10] but before
most of these were written, a further step in advance had been taken by
a man of genius, John Heywood (b. c. 1500, d. between 1577 and 1587),
whose "interludes"[11] were short farces in the French manner. The term
"interludes" was by no means new, but had been applied by friend and foe
to religious plays, and plays (including moralities) in general, already
in the 14th century. But it conveniently serves to designate a species
which marks a distinct stage in the history of the modern drama.
Heywood's interludes dealt entirely with real--very real--men and women.
Orthodox and conservative, he had at the same time a keen eye for the
vices as well as the follies of his age, and not the least for those of
the clerical profession. Other writers, such as T. Ingeland,[12] took
the same direction; and the allegory of abstractions was thus undermined
on the stage, very much as in didactic literature the ground had been
cut from under its feet by the _Ship of Fooles_. Thus the interludes
facilitated the advent of comedy, without having superseded the earlier
form. Both moralities and miracle-plays survived into the Elizabethan
age after the regular drama had already begun its course.
Pageants.
Such, in barest outline, was the progress of dramatic entertainments in
the principal countries of Europe, before the revival of classical
studies brought about a return to the examples of the classical drama,
or before this return had distinctly asserted itself. It must not,
however, be forgotten that from an early period in England as elsewhere
had flourished a species of entertainments, not properly speaking
dramatic, but largely contributing to form and foster a taste for
dramatic spectacles. The _pageants_--as they were called in
England--were the successors of those _ridings_ from which, when they
gladdened "Chepe," Chaucer's idle apprentice would not keep away; but
they had advanced in splendour and ingenuity of device under the
influence of Flemish and other foreign examples. Costumed figures
represented before gaping citizens the heroes of mythology and history,
and the abstractions of moral, patriotic, or municipal allegory; and the
city of London clung with special fervour to these exhibitions, which
the Elizabethan drama was neither able nor--as represented by most of
its poets who composed devices and short texts for these and similar
shows--willing to oust from popular favour. Some of the greatest and
some of the least of English dramatists were the ministers of pageantry;
and perhaps it would have been an advantage for the future of the
theatre if the legitimate drama and the _Triumphs of Old Drapery_ had
been more jealously kept apart. With the reign of Henry VIII. there also
set in a varied succession of entertainments at court and in the houses
of the great nobles, which may be said to have lasted through the Tudor
and early Stuart periods; but it would be an endless task to attempt to
discriminate the dramatic elements contained in these productions. The
"mask," stated to have been introduced from Italy into England as a new
diversion in 1512-1513, at first merely added a fresh element of
"disguising" to those already in use; as a quasi-dramatic species
("mask" or "masque") capable of a great literary development it hardly
asserted itself till quite the end of the 16th century.
11. THE MODERN NATIONAL DRAMA
Influence of the Renaissance.
The literary influence which finally transformed the growths noticed
above into the national dramas of the several countries of Europe, was
that of the Renaissance. Among the remains of classical antiquity which
were studied, translated and imitated, those of the drama necessarily
held a prominent place. Never altogether lost sight of, they now became
subjects of devoted research and models for more or less exact
imitation, first in Greek or Latin, then in modern tongues; and these
essentially literary endeavours came into more or less direct contact
with, and acquired more or less control over, dramatic performances and
entertainments already in existence. This process it will be most
convenient to pursue _seriatim_, in connexion with the rise and progress
of the several dramatic literatures of the West. For no sooner had the
stream of the modern drama, whose source and contributories have been
described, been brought back into the ancient bed, than its flow
diverged into a number of national currents, unequal in impetus and
strength, and varying in accordance with their manifold surroundings.
And even of these it is only possible to survey the most productive or
important.
(a) _Italy._
The modern Italian drama.
The priority in this as in most of the other aspects of the Renaissance
belongs to Italy. In ultimate achievement the Italian drama fell short
of the fulness of the results obtained elsewhere--a surprising fact when
it is considered, not only that the Italian language had the
vantage-ground of closest relationship to the Latin, but that the genius
of the Italian people has at all times led it to love the drama. The
cause is doubtless to be sought in the lack, noticeable in Italian
national life during a long period, and more especially during the
troubled days of division and strife coinciding with the rise and
earlier promise of Italian dramatic literature, of those loftiest and
most potent impulses of popular feeling to which a national drama owes
so much of its strength. This deficiency was due partly to the
peculiarities of the Italian character, partly to the political and
ecclesiastical experiences which Italy was fated to undergo. The
Italians were alike strangers to the enthusiasm of patriotism, which was
as the breath in the nostrils of the English Elizabethan age, and to the
religious devotion which identified Spain with the spirit of the
Catholic revival. The clear-sightedness of the Italians had something to
do with this, for they were too intelligent to believe in their tyrants,
and too free from illusions to deliver up their minds to their priests.
Finally, the chilling and enervating effects of a pressure of foreign
domination, such as no Western people with a history and a civilization
like those of Italy has ever experienced, contributed to paralyse for
many generations the higher efforts of the dramatic art. No basis was
permanently found for a really national tragedy; while literary comedy,
after turning from the direct imitation of Latin models to a more
popular form, lost itself in an abandoned immorality of tone and in
reckless insolence of invective against particular classes of society.
Though its productivity long continued, the poetic drama more and more
concentrated its efforts upon subordinate or subsidiary species,
artificial in origin and decorative in purpose, and surrendered its
substance to the overpowering aids of music, dancing and spectacle. Only
a single form of the Italian drama, improvised comedy, remained truly
national; and this was of its nature dissociated from higher literary
effort. The revival of Italian tragedy in later times is due partly to
the imitation of French models, partly to the endeavour of a brilliant
genius to infuse into his art the historical and political spirit.
Comedy likewise attained to new growths of considerable significance,
when it was sought to accommodate its popular forms to the
representation of real life in a wider range, and again to render it
more poetical in accordance with the tendencies of modern romanticism.
The regular Italian drama, in both its tragic and its comic branches,
began with a reproduction, in the Latin language, of classical
models--the first step, as it was to prove, towards the transformation
of the medieval into the modern drama, and the birth of modern dramatic
literature. But the process was both tentative and tedious, and must
have died away but for the pomp and circumstance with which some of the
patrons of the Renaissance at Florence, Rome and elsewhere surrounded
these manifestations of a fashionable taste, and for the patriotic
inspiration which from the first induced Italian writers to dramatize
themes of national historic interest. Greek tragedy had been long
forgotten, and one or two indications in the earlier part of the 16th
century of Italian interest in the Greek drama, chiefly due to the
printing presses, may be passed by.[13] To the later middle ages
classical tragedy meant Seneca, and even his plays remained unremembered
till the study of them was revived by the Paduan judge Lovato de' Lovati
(Lupatus, d. 1309). Of the comedies of Plautus three-fifths were not
rediscovered till 1429; and though Terence was much read in the schools,
he found no dramatic imitators, _pour le bon motif_ or otherwise, since
Hrosvitha.
Thus the first medieval follower of Seneca, Albertino Mussato
(1261-1330) may in a sense be called the father of modern dramatic
literature. Born at Padua, to which city all his services were given, he
in 1315 brought out his _Eccerinis_, a Latin tragedy very near to the
confines of epic poetry, intended to warn the Paduans against the
designs of Can Grande della Scala by the example of the tyrant Ezzelino.
Other tragedies of much the same type followed during the ensuing
century; such as L. da Fabiano's _De casu Caesenae_ (1377) a sort of
chronicle history in Latin prose on Cardinal Albornoz' capture of
Caesena.[14] Purely classical themes were treated in the _Achilleis_ of
A. de' Loschi of Vicenza (d. 1441), formerly attributed to Mussato,
several passages of which are taken verbally from Seneca; in the
celebrated _Progne_ of the Venetian Gregorio Cornaro, which is dated
1428-1429, and in later Latin productions included among the
translations and imitations of Greek and Latin tragedies and comedies by
Bishop Martirano (d. 1557), the friend of Pope Leo X.,[15] and the
efforts of Pomponius Laetus and his followers, who, with the aid of
Cardinal Raffaele Riario (1451-1521), sought to revive the ancient
theatre, with all its classical associations, at Rome.
In this general movement Latin comedy had quickly followed suit, and, as
just indicated, it is almost impossible, when we reach the height of the
Italian Renaissance under the Medici at Florence and at Rome in
particular, to review the progress of either species apart from that of
the other. If we possessed the lost _Philologia_ of Petrarch, of which,
as of a juvenile work, he declared himself ashamed, this would be the
earliest of extant humanistic comedies. As it is, this position is held
by _Paulus_, a Latin comedy of life on the classic model, by the
orthodox P. P. Vergerio (1370-1444); which was followed by many
others.[16]
Italian tragedy in the 16th century.
Early in the 16th century, tragedy began to be written in the native
tongue; but it retained from the first, and never wholly lost, the
impress of its origin. Whatever the source of its subjects--which,
though mostly of classical origin, were occasionally derived from native
romance, or even due to invention--they were all treated with a
predilection for the horrible, inspired by the example of Seneca, though
no doubt encouraged by a perennial national taste. The chorus,
stationary on the stage as in old Roman tragedy, was not reduced to a
merely occasional appearance between the acts till the beginning of the
17th century, or ousted altogether from the tragic drama till the
earlier half of the 18th. Thus the changes undergone by Italian tragedy
were for a long series of generations chiefly confined to the form of
versification and the choice of themes; nor was it, at all events till
the last century of the course which it has hitherto run, more than the
aftergrowth of an aftergrowth. The honour of having been the earliest
tragedy in Italian seems to belong to A. da Pistoia's _Pamfila_ (1499),
of which the subject was taken from Boccaccio, introduced by the ghost
of Seneca, and marred in the taking. Carretto's _Sofonisba_, which
hardly rises above the art of a chronicle history, though provided with
a chorus, followed in 1502. But the play usually associated with the
beginning of Italian tragedy--that with which "th' Italian scene first
learned to glow"--was another _Sofonisba_, acted before Leo X. in 1515,
and written in blank hendecasyllables instead of the _ottava_ and _terza
rima_ of the earlier tragedians (retaining, however, the lyric measures
of the chorus), by G. G. Trissino, who was employed as nuncio by that
pope. Other tragedies of the former half of the 16th century, largely
inspired by Trissino's example, were the _Rosmunda_ of Rucellai, a
nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1516); Martelli's _Tullia_,
Alamanni's _Antigone_ (1532); the _Canace_ of Sperone Speroni, the
envious _Mopsus_ of Tasso, who, like Guarini, took Sperone's elaborate
style for his model; the _Orazia_, the earliest dramatic treatment of
this famous subject by the notorious Aretino (1549); and the nine
tragedies of G. B. Giraldi (Cinthio) of Ferrara, among which
_L'Orbecche_ (1541) is accounted the best and the bloodiest. Cinthio,
the author of those _Hecatommithi_ to which Shakespeare was indebted for
so many of his subjects, was (supposing him to have invented these) the
first Italian who was the author of the fables of his own dramas; he
introduced some novelties into dramatic construction, separating the
prologue and probably also the epilogue from the action, and has by some
been regarded as the inventor of the pastoral drama. But his style was
arid. In the latter half of the 16th century may be mentioned the
_Didone_ and the _Marianna_ of L. Dolce, the translator of Euripides and
Seneca (1565); A. Leonico's _Il Soldato_ (1550); the _Adriana_ (acted
before 1561 or 1586) of L. Groto, which treats the story of _Romeo and
Juliet_; Tasso's _Torrismondo_ (1587); the _Tancredi_ of Asinari (1588);
and the _Merope_ of Torelli (1593), the last who employed the stationary
chorus (_coro fisso_) on the Italian stage. Leonico's _Soldato_ is
noticeable as supposed to have given rise to the _tragedia cittadina_,
or domestic tragedy, of which there are few examples in the Italian
drama, and De Velo's _Tamar_ (1586) as written in prose. Subjects of
modern historical interest were in this period treated only in isolated
instances.[17]
Italian tragedy in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Maffei.
Metastasio.
Alfieri.
The tragedians of the 17th century continued to pursue the beaten track,
marked out already in the 16th by rigid prescription. In course of time,
however, they sought by the introduction of musical airs to compromise
with the danger with which their art was threatened of being (in
Voltaire's phrase) extinguished by the beautiful monster, the opera, now
rapidly gaining ground in the country of its origin. (See OPERA.) To
Count P. Bonarelli (1589-1659), the author of _Solimano_, is on the
other hand ascribed the first disuse of the chorus in Italian tragedy.
The innovation of the use of rhyme attempted in the learned
Pallavicino's _Erminigildo_ (1655), and defended by him in a discourse
prefixed to the play, was unable to achieve a permanent success in Italy
any more than in England; its chief representative was afterwards
Martelli (d. 1727), whose rhymed Alexandrian verse (_Martelliano_),
though on one occasion used in comedy by Goldoni, failed to commend
itself to the popular taste. By the end of the 17th century Italian
tragedy seemed destined to expire, and the great tragic actor Cotta had
withdrawn in disgust at the apathy of the public towards the higher
forms of the drama. The 18th century was, however, to witness a change,
the beginnings of which are attributed to the institution of the Academy
of the Arcadians at Rome (1690). The principal efforts of the new school
of writers and critics were directed to the abolition of the chorus, and
to a general increase of freedom in treatment. Before long the marquis
S. Maffei with his _Merope_ (first printed 1713) achieved one of the
most brilliant successes recorded in the history of dramatic literature.
This play, which is devoid of any love-story, long continued to be
considered the masterpiece of Italian tragedy; Voltaire, who declared it
"worthy of the most glorious days of Athens," adapted it for the French
stage, and it inspired a celebrated production of the English drama.[18]
It was followed by a tragedy full of horrors,[19] noticeable as having
given rise to the first Italian dramatic _parody_; and by the highly
esteemed productions of Granelli (d. 1769) and his contemporary
Bettinelli. P. T. Metastasio (1698-1782), who had early begun his career
as a dramatist by a strict adherence to the precepts of Aristotle,
gained celebrity by his contributions to the operatic drama at Naples,
Venice and Vienna (where he held office as _poeta cesareo_, whose
function was to arrange the court entertainments). But his _libretti_
have a poetic value of their own;[20] and Voltaire pronounced much of
him worthy of Corneille and of Racine, when at their best. The influence
of Voltaire had now come to predominate over the Italian drama; and, in
accordance with the spirit of the times, greater freedom prevailed in
the choice of tragic themes. Thus the greatest of Italian tragic poets.
Count V. Alfieri (1749-1803), found his path prepared for him. Alfieri's
grand and impassioned treatment of his subjects caused his faultiness of
form, which he never altogether overcame, to be forgotten. His themes
were partly classical;[21] but the spirit of a love of freedom which his
creations[22] breathe was the herald of the national ideas of the
future. Spurning the usages of French tragedy, his plays, which abound
in soliloquies, owe part of their effect to an impassioned force of
declamation, part to those "points" by which Italian acting seems
pre-eminently capable of thrilling an audience. He has much besides the
subjects of two of his dramas[23] in common with Schiller, but his
amazon-muse (as Schlegel called her) was not schooled into serenity,
like the muse of the German poet. Among his numerous plays (21),
_Merope_ and _Saul_, and perhaps _Mirra_, are accounted his
masterpieces.
Tragedians since Alfieri.
The political colouring given by Alfieri to Italian tragedy reappears in
the plays of U. Foscolo and A. Manzoni, both of whom are under the
influence of the romantic school of modern literature; and to these
names must be added those of S. Pellico and G. B. Niccolini (1785-1861),
Paolo Giacometti (b. 1816) and others, whose dramas[24] treat largely
national themes familiar to all students of modern history and
literature. In their hands Italian tragedy upon the whole adhered to its
love of strong situations and passionate declamation. Since the
successful efforts of G. Modena (1804-1861) renovated the tragic stage
in Italy, the art of tragic acting long stood at a higher level in this
than in almost any other European country; in Adelaide Ristori (Marchesa
del Grillo) the tragic stage lost one of the greatest of modern
actresses; and Ernesto Rossi (1827-1896) and Tommaso Salvini long
remained rivals in the noblest forms of tragedy.
Italian comedy; popular forms.
Commedia dell' arte.
Masked comedy.
In comedy, the efforts of the scholars of the Italian Renaissance for a
time went side by side with the progress of the popular entertainments
noticed above. While the _contrasti_ of the close of the 15th and of the
16th century were disputations between pairs of abstract or allegorical
figures, in the _frottola_ human types take the place of abstractions,
and more than two characters appear. The _farsa_ (a name used of a wide
variety of entertainments) was still under medieval influences, and in
this popular form Alione of Asti (soon after 1500) was specially
productive. To these popular diversions a new literary as well as social
significance was given by the Neapolitan court-poet Sannazaro (c. 1492);
about the same time a _capitano valoroso_, Venturino of Pesara, first
brought on the modern stage the _capitano glorioso_ or _spavente_, the
military braggart, who owed his origin both to Plautus[25] and to the
Spanish officers who abounded in the Italy of those days. The popular
character-comedy, a relic of the ancient _Atellanae_, likewise took a
new lease of life--and this in a double form. The _improvised_ comedy
(_commedia a soggetto_) was now as a rule performed by professional
actors, members of a _craft_, and was thence called the _commedia dell'
arte_, which is said to have been invented by Francesco (called
Terenziano) Cherea, the favourite player of Leo X. Its scenes, still
unwritten except in skeleton (_scenario_), were connected together by
the ligatures or links (_lazzi_) of the _arlecchino_, the descendant of
the ancient Roman _sannio_ (whence our _zany_). Harlequin's summit of
glory was probably reached early in the 17th century, when he was
ennobled in the person of Cecchino by the emperor Matthias; of
Cecchino's successors, Zaccagnino and Truffaldino, we read that "they
shut the door in Italy to good harlequins." Distinct from this growth is
that of the _masked_ comedy, the action of which was chiefly carried on
by certain typical figures in masks, speaking in local dialects,[26]
but which was not improvised, and indeed from the nature of the case
hardly could have been. Its inventor was A. Beolco of Padua, who called
himself Ruzzante (joker), and is memorable under that name as the first
actor-playwright--a combination of extreme significance for the history
of the modern stage. He published six comedies in various dialects,
including the Greek of the day (1530). This was the masked comedy to
which the Italians so tenaciously clung, and in which, as all their own
and imitable by no other nation, they took so great a pride that even
Goldoni was unable to overthrow it. Improvisation and burlesque, alike
abominable to comedy proper, were inseparable from the species.
Early Italian regular comedy.
Meanwhile, the Latin imitations of Roman, varied by occasional
translations of Greek, comedies early led to the production of Italian
translations, several of which were performed at Ferrara in the last
quarter of the 15th century, whence they spread to Milan, Pavia and
other towns of the north. Contemporaneously, imitations of Latin comedy
made their appearance, for the most part in rhymed verse; most of them
applying classical treatment to subjects derived from Boccaccio's and
other _novelle_, some still mere adaptations of ancient models. In these
circumstances it is all but idle to assign the honour of having been
"the first Italian comedy"--and thus the first comedy in modern dramatic
literature--to any particular play. Boiardo's _Timone_ (before 1494),
for which this distinction was frequently claimed, is to a large extent
founded on a dialogue of Lucian's; and, since some of its personages are
abstractions, and Olympus is domesticated on an upper stage, it cannot
be regarded as more than a transition from the moralities. A. Ricci's _I
Tre Tiranni_ (before 1530) seems still to belong to the same
transitional species. Among the earlier imitators of Latin comedy in the
vernacular may be noted G. Visconti, one of the poets patronized by
Ludovico il Moro at Milan;[27] the Florentines G. B. Araldo, J. Nardi,
the historian,[28] and D. Gianotti.[29] The step--very important had it
been adopted consistently or with a view to consistency--of substituting
prose for verse as the diction of comedy, is sometimes attributed to
Ariosto; but, though his first two comedies were originally written in
prose, the experiment was not new, nor did he persist in its adoption.
Caretto's _I Sei Contenti_ dates from the end of the 15th century, and
Publio Filippo's _Formicone_, taken from Apuleius, followed quite early
in the 16th. Machiavelli, as will be seen, wrote comedies both in prose
and in verse.
But, whoever wrote the first Italian comedy, Ludovico Ariosto was the
first master of the species. All but the first two of his comedies,
belonging as they do to the field of _commedia erudita_, or scholarly
comedy, are in blank verse, to which he gave a singular mobility by the
dactylic ending of the line (_sdrucciolo_). Ariosto's models were the
masterpieces of the _palliata_, and his morals those of his age, which
emulated those of the worst days of ancient Rome or Byzantium in
looseness, and surpassed them in effrontery. He chose his subjects
accordingly; but his dramatic genius displayed itself in the effective
drawing of character,[30] and more especially in the skilful management
of complicated intrigues.[31] Such, with an additional brilliancy of wit
and lasciviousness of tone, are likewise the characteristics of
Machiavelli's famous prose comedy, the _Mandragola_ (_The Magic
Draught_);[32] and at the height of their success, of the plays of P.
Aretino,[33] especially the prose _Marescalco_ (1526-1527) whose name,
it has been said, ought to be written in asterisks. It may be added that
the plays of Ariosto and his followers were represented with magnificent
scenery and settings. Other dramatists of the 16th century were B.
Accolti, whose _Virginia_ (prob. before 1513) treats the story from
Boccaccio which reappears in _All's Well that Ends Well_; G. Cecchi, F.
d'Ambra, A. F. Grazzini, N. Secco or Secchi and L. Dolce--all writers of
romantic comedy of intrigue in verse or prose.
The pastoral drama.
During the same century the "pastoral drama" flourished in Italy. The
origin of this peculiar species--which was the bucolic idyll in a
dramatic form, and which freely lent itself to the introduction of both
mythological and allegorical elements--was purely literary, and arose
directly out of the classical studies and tastes of the Renaissance. It
was very far removed from the genuine peasant plays which flourished in
Venetia and Tuscany early in the 16th century. The earliest example of
the artificial, but in some of its productions exquisite, growth in
question was the renowned scholar A. Politian's _Orfeo_ (1472), which
begins like an idyll and ends like a tragedy. Intended to be performed
with music--for the pastoral drama is the parent of the opera--this
beautiful work tells its story simply. N. da Correggio's (1450-1508)
_Cefalo_, or _Aurora_, and others followed, before in 1554 A. Beccari
produced, as totally new of its kind, his Arcadian pastoral drama _Il
Sagrifizio_, in which the comic element predominates. But an epoch in
the history of the species is marked by the _Aminta_ of Tasso (1573), in
whose Arcadia is allegorically mirrored the Ferrara court. Adorned by
choral lyrics of great beauty, it presents an allegorical treatment of a
social and moral problem; and since the conception of the characters,
all of whom think and speak of nothing but love, is artificial, the
charm of the poem lies not in the interest of its action, but in the
passion and sweetness of its sentiment. This work was the model of many
others, and the pastoral drama reached its height of popularity in the
famous _Pastor fido_ (written before 1590) of G. B. Guarini, which,
while founded on a tragic love-story, introduces into its complicated
plot a comic element, partly with a satirical intention. It is one of
those exceptional works which, by circumstance as well as by merit, have
become the property of the world's literature at large. Thus, both in
Italian and in other literatures, the pastoral drama became a distinct
species, characterized, like the great body of modern pastoral poetry in
general, by a tendency either towards the artificial or towards the
burlesque. Its artificiality affected the entire growth of Italian
comedy, including the _commedia dell' arte_, and impressed itself in an
intensified form upon the opera. The foremost Italian masters of the
last-named species, so far as it can claim to be included in the poetic
drama, were A. Zeno (1668-1750) and P. Metastasio.
Comedy in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Goldoni.
Gozzi.
The comic dramatists of the 17th century are grouped as followers of the
classical and of the romantic school, G. B. della Porta (q.v.) and G. A.
Cicognini (whom Goldoni describes as full of whining pathos and
commonplace drollery, but as still possessing a great power to interest)
being regarded as the leading representatives of the former. But neither
of these largely intermixed groups of writers could, with all its
fertility, prevail against the competition, on the one hand of the
musical drama, and on the other of the popular farcical entertainments
and those introduced in imitation of Spanish examples. Italian comedy
had fallen into decay, when its reform was undertaken by the wonderful
theatrical genius of C. Goldoni. One of the most fertile and rapid of
playwrights (of his 150 comedies 16 were written and acted in a single
year), he at the same time pursued definite aims as a dramatist.
Disgusted with the conventional buffoonery, and ashamed of the rampant
immorality of the Italian comic stage, he drew his characters from real
life, whether of his native city (Venice)[34] or of society at large,
and sought to enforce virtuous and pathetic sentiments without
neglecting the essential objects of his art. Happy and various in his
choice of themes, and dipping deep into a popular life with which he had
a genuine sympathy, he produced, besides comedies of general human
character,[35] plays on subjects drawn from literary biography[36] or
from fiction.[37] Goldoni, whose style was considered defective by the
purists whom Italy has at no time lacked, met with a severe critic and a
temporarily successful rival in Count C. Gozzi (1722-1806), who sought
to rescue the comic drama from its association with the actual life of
the middle classes, and to infuse a new spirit into the figures of the
old masked comedy by the invention of a new species. His themes were
taken from Neapolitan[38] and Oriental[39] fairy tales, to which he
accommodated some of the standing figures upon which Goldoni had made
war. This attempt at mingling fancy and humour--occasionally of a
directly satirical turn[40]--was in harmony with the tendencies of the
modern romantic school; and Gozzi's efforts, which though successful
found hardly any imitators in Italy, have a family resemblance to those
of Tieck and of some more recent writers whose art wings its flight,
through the windows, "over the hills and far away."
Comedians after Goldoni.
During the latter part of the 18th and the early years of the 19th
century comedy continued to follow the course marked out by its
acknowledged master Goldoni, under the influence of the sentimental
drama of France and other countries. Abati Andrea Villi, the marquis
Albergati Capacelli, Antonio Simone Sografi (1760-1825), Federici, and
Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731-1815), the historian of the drama, are
mentioned among the writers of this school; to the 19th century belong
Count Giraud, Marchisio (who took his subjects especially from
commercial life), and Nota, a fertile writer, among whose plays are
three treating the lives of poets. Of still more recent date are L. B.
Bon and A. Brofferio. At the same time, the comedy of dialect to which
the example of Goldoni had given sanction in Venice, flourished there as
well as in the mutually remote spheres of Piedmont and Naples. Quite
modern developments must remain unnoticed here; but the fact cannot be
ignored that they signally illustrate the perennial vitality of the
modern drama in the home of its beginnings. A new realistic style set
fully in about the middle of the 18th century with P. Ferrari and A.
Torelli; and though an historical reaction towards classical and
medieval themes is associated with the names of P. Cossa and G. Giacosa,
modernism reasserted itself through P. Bracco and other dramatists. It
should be noted that the influence of great actors, more especially
Ermete Novelli and Eleanora Duse, must be credited with a large share of
the success with which the Italian stage has held its own even against
the foreign influences to which it gave room. And it would seem as if
even the paradoxical endeavour of the poet Gabrielle d' Annunzio to
lyricize the drama by ignoring action as its essence were a problem for
the solution of which the stage can furnish unexpected conditions of its
own. In any event, both Italian tragedy and Italian comedy have survived
periods of a seemingly hopeless decline; and the fear has vanished that
either the opera or the ballet might succeed in ousting from the
national stage the legitimate forms of the national drama.
(b) _Greece._
Modern Greek and Dalmatian drama.
The dramatic literature of the later Hellenes is a creation of the
literary movement which preceded their noble struggle for independence,
or which may be said to form part of that struggle. After beginning with
dramatic dialogues of a patriotic tendency, it took a step in advance
with the tragedies of J. R. Nerulos[41] (1778-1850), whose name belongs
to the political as well as to the literary history of his country. His
comedies--especially one directed against the excesses of
journalism[42]--largely contributed to open a literary life for the
modern Greek tongue. Among the earlier patriotic Greek dramatists of the
19th century are T. Alkaeos, J. Zampelios (whose tragic style was
influenced by that of Alfieri),[43] S. K. Karydis and A. Valaoritis. A.
Zoiros[44] is noteworthy as having introduced the use of prose into
Greek tragedy, while preserving to it that association with sentiments
and aspirations which will probably long continue to pervade the chief
productions of modern Greek literature. The love of the theatre is
ineradicable from Attic as it is from Italian soil; and the tendencies
of the young dramatic literature of Hellas which is not wholly absorbed
in the effort to keep abreast of recent modern developments, seem to
justify the hope that a worthy future awaits it.
Under Italian influence an interesting dramatic growth attained to some
vitality in the Dalmatian lands about the beginning of the 16th century,
where the religious drama, whose days were passing away in Italy, found
favour with a people with a scant popular literature of its own. At
Ragusa Italian literary influence had been spread by the followers of
Petrarch from the later years of the 15th century; here several
Servo-Croatian writers produced religious plays in the manner of the
Italian _rappresentazioni_; and a gifted poet, Martin Drzic, composed,
besides religious plays and farces, a species of pastoral which enjoyed
much favour.
(c) _Spain._
Spain is the only country of modern Europe which shares with England the
honour of having achieved, at a relatively early date, the creation of a
genuinely national form of the regular drama. So proper to Spain was the
form of the drama which she produced and perfected, that to it the term
_romantic_ has been specifically applied, though so restricted a use of
the epithet is clearly unjustifiable. The influences which from the
Romance peoples--in whom Christian and Germanic elements mingled with
the legacy of Roman law, learning and culture--spread to the Germanic
nations were represented with the most signal force and fulness in the
institutions of chivalry,--to which, in the words of Scott, "it was
peculiar to blend military valour with the strongest passions which
actuate the human mind, the feelings of devotion and those of love."
These feelings, in their combined operation upon the national character,
and in their reflection in the national literature, were not confined to
Spain; but nowhere did they so long or so late continue to animate the
moral life of a nation.
Outward causes contributed to this result. For centuries after the
crusades had become a mere memory, Spain was a battle-ground between the
Cross and the Crescent. And it was just at the time when the Renaissance
was establishing new starting-points for the literary progress of
Europe, that Christian Spain rose to the height of Catholic as well as
national self-consciousness by the expulsion of the Moors and the
conquest of the New World. From their rulers or rivals of so many
centuries the Spaniards derived that rich, if not very varied, glow of
colour which became permanently distinctive of their national life, and
more especially of its literary and artistic expressions; they also
perhaps derived from the same source a not less characteristically
refined treatment of the passion of love. The ideas of Spanish
chivalry--more especially religious devotion and a punctilious sense of
personal honour--asserted themselves (according to a process often
observable in the history of civilization) with peculiar distinctness in
literature and art, after the period of great achievements to which they
had contributed in other fields had come to an end. The ripest glories
of the Spanish drama belong to an age of national decay--mindful, it is
true, of the ideas of a greater past. The chivalrous enthusiasm
pervading so many of the masterpieces of its literature is indeed a
distinctive feature of the Spanish nation in all, even in the least
hopeful, periods of its later history; and the religious ardour breathed
by these works, though associating itself with what is called the
Catholic Reaction, is in truth only a manifestation of the spirit which
informed the noblest part of the Reformation movement itself. The
Spanish drama neither sought nor could seek to emancipate itself from
views and forms of religious life more than ever sacred to the Spanish
people since the glorious days of Ferdinand and Isabella; and it is not
so much in the beginnings as in the great age of Spanish dramatic
literature that it seems most difficult to distinguish between what is
to be termed a religious and what a secular play. After Spain had thus,
the first after England among modern European countries, fully unfolded
that incomparably richest expression of national life and sentiment in
an artistic form--a truly national dramatic literature,--the terrible
decay of her greatness and prosperity gradually impaired the strength of
a brilliant but, of its nature, dependent growth. In the absence of high
original genius the Spanish dramatists began to turn to foreign models,
though little supported in such attempts by popular sympathy; and it is
only in more recent times that the Spanish drama has sought to reproduce
the ancient forms from whose masterpieces the nation had never become
estranged, while accommodating them to tastes and tendencies shared by
later Spanish literature with that of Europe at large.
Early efforts.
Gil Vicente.
The earlier dramatic efforts of Spanish literature may without
inconvenience be briefly dismissed. The reputed author of the _Coplas de
Mingo Revulgo_ (R. Cota the elder) likewise composed the first act of a
story of intrigue and character, purely dramatic but not intended for
representation. This tragic comedy of _Calisto and Meliboea_, which was
completed (in 21 acts) by 1499, afterwards became famous under the name
of _Celestina_; it was frequently imitated and translated, and was
adapted for the Spanish stage by R. de Zepeda in 1582. But the father of
the Spanish drama was J. de la Enzina, whose _representaciones_ under
the name of "eclogues" were dramatic dialogues of a religious or
pastoral character. His attempts were imitated more especially by the
Portuguese Gil Vicente, whose writings for the stage appear to be
included in the period 1502-1536, and who wrote both in Spanish and in
his native tongue. A further impulse came, as was natural, from
Spaniards resident in Italy, and especially from B. de Torres Naharro,
who in 1517 published, as the chief among the "firstlings of his genius"
(_Propaladia_), a series of eight _comedias_--a term generally applied
in Spanish literature to any kind of drama. He claimed some knowledge of
the theory of the ancient drama, divided his plays into _jornadas_[45]
(to correspond to acts), and opened them with an _introyto_ (prologue).
Very various in their subjects, and occasionally odd in form,[46] they
were gross as well as audacious in tone, and were soon prohibited by the
Inquisition. The church remained unwilling to renounce her control over
such dramatic exhibitions as she permitted, and sought to suppress the
few plays on not strictly religious subjects which appeared in the early
part of the reign of Charles I. Though the universities produced both
translations from the classical drama and modern Latin plays, these
exercised very little general effect. Juan Perez' (Petreius') posthumous
Latin comedies were mainly versions of Ariosto.[47]
Lope de Rueda and his followers.
Classical dramas.
Thus the foundation of the Spanish national theatre was reserved for a
man of the people. Cervantes has vividly sketched the humble resources
which were at the command of Lope de Rueda, a mechanic of Seville, who
with his friend the bookseller Timoneda, and two brother authors and
actors in his strolling company, succeeded in bringing dramatic
entertainments out of the churches and palaces into the public places of
the towns, where they were produced on temporary scaffolds. The manager
carried about his properties in a corn-sack; and the "comedies" were
still only "dialogues, and a species of eclogues between two or three
shepherds and a shepherdess," enlivened at times by intermezzos of
favourite comic figures, such as the negress or the Biscayan, "played
with inconceivable talent and truthfulness by Lope." One of his plays at
least,[48] and one of Timoneda's,[49] seem to have been taken from an
Italian source; others mingled modern themes with classical
apparitions,[50] one of Timoneda's was (perhaps again through the
Italian) from Plautus.[51] Others of a slighter description were called
_pasos_,--a species afterwards termed _entremeses_ and resembling the
modern French _proverbes_. With these popular efforts of Lope de Rueda
and his friends a considerable dramatic activity began in the years
1560-1590 in several Spanish cities, and before the close of this period
permanent theatres began to be fitted up at Madrid. Yet Spanish dramatic
literature might still have been led to follow Italian into an imitation
of classical models. Two plays by G. Bermudez (1577), called by their
learned author "the first Spanish tragedies," treating the national
subject of Inez de Castro, but divided into five acts, composed in
various metres, and introducing a chorus; a _Dido_ (c. 1580) by C. de
Virues (who claimed to have first divided dramas into three _jornadas_);
and the tragedies of L. L. de Argensola (acted 1585, and praised in _Don
Quixote_) alike represent this tendency.
Cervantes.
Such were the alternatives which had opened for the Spanish drama, when
at last, about the same time as that of the English, its future was
determined by writers of original genius. The first of these was the
immortal Cervantes, who, however, failed to anticipate by his earlier
plays (1584-1588) the great (though to him unproductive) success of his
famous romance. In his endeavour to give a poetic character to the drama
he fell upon the expedient of introducing personified abstractions
speaking a "divine" or elevated language--a device which was for a time
favourably received. But these plays exhibit a neglect or ignorance of
the laws of dramatic construction; their action is episodical; and it is
from the realism of these episodes (especially in the _Numancia_, which
is crowded with both figures and incidents), and from the power and flow
of the declamation, that their effect must have been derived. When in
his later years (1615) Cervantes returned to dramatic composition, the
style and form of the national drama had been definitively settled by a
large number of writers, the brilliant success of whose acknowledged
chief may previously have diverted Cervantes from his labours for the
theatre. His influence upon the general progress of dramatic literature
is, however, to be sought, not only in his plays, but also in those
_novelas exemplares_--incomparable alike in their clearness and their
terseness of narrative--to which more than one drama is indebted for its
plot, and for much of its dialogue to boot.
Lope de Vega.
Lope de Vega, one of the most astonishing geniuses the world has known,
permanently established the national forms of the Spanish drama. Some of
these were in their beginnings taken over by him from ruder
predecessors; some were cultivated with equal or even superior success
by subsequent authors; but in variety, as in fertility of dramatic
production, he has no rivals. His fertility, which was such that he
wrote about 1500 plays, besides 300 dramatic works classed as _autos
sacramentales_ and _entremeses_, and a vast series of other literary
compositions, has indisputably prejudiced his reputation with those to
whom he is but a name and a number. Yet as a dramatist Lope more fully
exemplifies the capabilities of the Spanish theatre than any of his
successors, though as a poet Calderon may deserve the palm. Nor would it
be possible to imagine a truer representative of the Spain of his age
than a poet who, after suffering the hardships of poverty and exile, and
the pangs of passion, sailed against the foes of the faith in the
Invincible Armada, subsequently became a member of the Holy Inquisition
and of the order of St Francis, and after having been decorated by the
pope with the cross of Malta and a theological doctorate, honoured by
the nobility, and idolized by the nation, ended with the names of Jesus
and Mary on his lips. From the plays of such a writer we may best learn
the manners and the sentiments, the ideas of religion and honour, of the
Spain of the Philippine age, the age when she was most prominent in the
eyes of Europe and most glorious in her own. For, with all its
inventiveness and vigour, the genius of Lope primarily set itself the
task of pleasing his public,--the very spirit of whose inner as well as
outer life is accordingly mirrored in his dramatic works. In them we
have, in the words of Lope's French translator Baret, "the movement, the
clamour, the conflict of unforeseen intrigues suitable to unreflecting
spectators; perpetual flatteries addressed to an unextinguishable
national pride; the painting of passions dear to a people never tired of
admiring itself; the absolute sway of the point of honour; the
deification of revenge; the adoration of symbols; buffoonery and
burlesque, everywhere beloved of the multitude, but here never defiled
by obscenities, for this people has a sense of delicacy, and the
foundation of its character is nobility; lastly, the flow of proverbs
which at times escape from the _gracioso_" (the comic servant
domesticated in the Spanish drama by Lope)--"the commonplace literature
of those who possess no other."
Comedias de capa y espada.
Heróicas.
Comedias de santos.
Autos sacramentales.
Entremeses.
The plays of Lope, and those of the national Spanish drama in general,
are divided into classes which it is naturally not always easy, and
which there is no reason to suppose him always to have intended, to keep
distinct from one another. After in his early youth composing eclogues,
pastoral plays, and allegorical moralities in the old style, he began
his theatrical activity at Madrid about 1590, and the plays which he
thenceforth produced have been distributed under the following heads.
The _comedias_, all of which are in verse, include (1) the so-called _c.
de capa y espada_--not comedies proper, but dramas in which the
principal personages are taken from the class of society that wears
cloak and sword. Gallantry is their main theme, an interesting and
complicated, but well-constructed and perspicuous intrigue their chief
feature; and this is usually accompanied by an underplot in which the
_gracioso_ plays his part. Their titles are frequently taken from the
old proverbs or proverbial phrases of the people[52] upon the theme
suggested, by which the plays often (as G. H. Lewes admirably expresses
it) constitute a kind of gloss (_glosa_) in action. This is the
favourite species of the national Spanish theatre; and to the plots of
the plays belonging to it the drama of other nations owes a debt almost
incalculable in extent. (2) The _c. heróicas_ are distinguished by some
of their personages being of royal or very high rank, and by their
themes being often historical and largely[53] (though not
invariably[54]) taken from the national annals, or founded on
contemporary or recent events.[55] Hence they exhibit a greater gravity
of tone; but in other respects there is no difference between them and
the cloak-and-sword comedies with which they share the element of comic
underplots. Occasionally Lope condescended in the opposite direction, to
(3) plays of which the scene is laid in common life, but for which no
special name appears to have existed.[56] Meanwhile, both he and his
successors were too devoted sons of the church not to acknowledge in
some sort her claim to influence the national drama. This claim she had
never relinquished, even when she could no longer retain an absolute
control over the stage. For a time, indeed, she was able to reassert
even this; for the exhibition of all secular plays was in 1598
prohibited by the dying Philip II., and remained so for two years; and
Lope with his usual facility proceeded to supply religious plays of
various kinds. After a few dramas on scriptural subjects he turned to
the legends of the saints; and the _comedias de santos_, of which he
wrote a great number, became an accepted later Spanish variety of the
miracle-play. True, however, to the popular instincts of his genius, he
threw himself with special zeal and success into the composition of
another kind of religious plays--a development of the Corpus Christi
pageants, in honour of which all the theatres had to close their doors
for a month. These were the famous _autos sacramentales_ (i.e. solemn
"acts" or proceedings in honour of the Sacrament), which were performed
in the open air by actors who had filled the cars of the sacred
procession. Of these Lope wrote about 400. These entertainments were
arranged on a fixed scheme, comprising a prologue in dialogue between
two or more actors in character (_loa_), a farce (_entremes_), and the
_auto_ proper, an allegorical scene of religious purport, as an example
of which Ticknor cites the _Bridge of the World_,--in which the Prince
of Darkness in vain seeks to defend the bridge against the Knight of the
Cross, who finally leads the Soul of Man in triumph across it. Not all
the _entremeses_ of Lope and others were, however, composed for
insertion in these _autos_. This long-lived popular species, together
with the old kind of dramatic dialogue called _eclogues_, completes the
list of the varieties of his dramatic works.
The school of Lope.
The example of Lope was followed by a large number of writers, and Spain
thus rapidly became possessed of a dramatic literature almost
unparalleled in quantity--for in fertility also Lope was but the first
among many. Among the writers of Lope's school, his friend G. de Castro
(1569-1631) must not be passed by, for his _Cid_[57] was the basis of
Corneille's; nor J. P. de Montalban, "the first-born of Lope's genius,"
the extravagance of whose imagination, like that of Lee, culminated in
madness. Soon after him died (1639) Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, in whose
plays, as contrasted with those of Lope, has been recognized the
distinctive element of a moral purpose. To G. Tellez, called Tirso de
Molina (d. 1648), no similar praise seems due; but the frivolous gaiety
of the inventor of the complete character of Don Juan was accompanied by
ingenuity in the construction of his excellent[58] though at times
"sensational"[59] plots. F. de Rojas Zorrilla (b. 1607), who was largely
plundered by the French dramatists of the latter half of the century,
survived Molina for about a generation. In vain scholars of strictly
classical tastes protested in essays in prose and verse against the
ascendancy of the popular drama; the prohibition of Philip II. had been
recalled two years after his death and was never renewed; and the
activity of the theatre spread through the towns and villages of the
land, everywhere under the controlling influence of the school of
writers who had established so complete a harmony between the drama and
the tastes and tendencies of the people.
Calderon.
The glories of Spanish dramatic literature reached their height in P.
Calderon de la Barca, though in the history of the Spanish theatre he
holds only the second place. He elaborated some of the forms of the
national drama, but brought about no changes of moment in any of them.
Even the brilliancy of his style, glittering with a constant
reproduction of the same family of tropes, and the variety of his
melodious versification, are mere intensifications of the poetic
qualities of Lope, while in their moral and religious sentiments, and
their general views of history and society, there is no difference
between the two. Like Lope, Calderon was a soldier in his youth and an
ecclesiastic in his later years; like his senior, he suited himself to
the tastes of both court and people, and applied his genius with equal
facility to the treatment of religious and of secular themes. In
fertility Calderon was inferior to Lope (for he wrote not many more than
100 plays); but he surpasses the elder poet in richness of style, and
more especially in fire of imagination. In his _autos_ (of which he is
said to have left not less than 73), Calderon probably attained to his
most distinctive excellence; some of these appear to take a wide range
of allegorical invention,[60] while they uniformly possess great beauty
of poetical detail. Other of his most famous or interesting pieces are
_comedias de santos_.[61] In his secular plays he treats as wide a
variety of subjects as Lope, but it is not a dissimilar variety; nor
would it be easy to decide whether a poet so uniformly admirable within
his limits has achieved greater success in romantic historical
tragedy,[62] in the comedy of amorous intrigue,[63] or in a dramatic
work combining fancy and artificiality in such a degree that it has been
diversely described as a romantic caprice and as a philosophical
poem.[64]
Contemporaries of Calderon.
Moreto and the comedia de figuron.
During the life of the second great master of the Spanish drama there
was little apparent abatement in the productivity of its literature;
while the _autos_ continued to flourish in Madrid and elsewhere, till in
1765 (shortly before the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain) their
public representation was prohibited by royal decree. In the world of
fashion, the opera had reached Spain already during Calderon's lifetime,
together with other French influences, and the great dramatist had
himself written one or two of his plays for performance with music. But
the regular national drama continued to command popular favour, and with
A. Moreto may be said to have actually taken a step in advance. While he
wrote in all the forms established by Lope and cultivated by Calderon,
his manner seems most nearly to approach the masterpieces of French and
later English comedy of character; he was the earliest writer of the
_comedias de figuron_, in which the most prominent personage is (in
Congreve's phrase) "a character of affectation," in other words, the
Spanish fop of real life.[65] His masterpiece, a favourite of many
stages, is one of the most graceful and pleasing of modern
comedies--simple but interesting in plot, and true to nature, with
something like Shakespearian truth.[66] Other writers trod more closely
in the footsteps of the masters without effecting any noticeable changes
in the form of the Spanish drama; even the _saynete_ (tit-bit), which
owes its name to Benavente (fl. 1645), was only a kind of _entremes_.
The Spanish drama in all its forms retained its command over the nation,
because they were alike popular in origin and character; nor is there
any other example of so complete an adaptation of a national art to the
national taste and sentiment in its ethics and aesthetics, in the nature
of the plots of the plays (whatever their origin), in the motives of
their actions, in the conduct and tone and in the very costume of their
characters.
Decay of the national Spanish drama.
The French school of the 18th century.
Other later dramatists.
National as it was, and because of this very quality, the Spanish drama
was fated to share the lot of the people it so fully represented. At the
end of the 17th century, when the Spanish throne at last became the
declared apple of discord among the governments of Europe, the Spanish
people lay, in the words of an historian of its later days, "like a
corpse, incapable of feeling its own impotence." That national art to
which it had so faithfully clung had fallen into decline and decay with
the spirit of Spain itself. By the time of the close of the great war,
the theatre had sunk into a mere amusement of the populace, which during
the greater part of the 18th century, while allowing the old masters the
measure of favour which accords with traditional esteem, continued to
uphold the representatives of the old drama in its degeneracy--authors on
the level of their audiences. But the Spanish court was now French, and
in the drama, even more than in any other form of art, France was the
arbiter of taste in Europe. With the restoration of peace accordingly
began isolated attempts to impose the French canons of dramatic theory,
and to follow the example of French dramatic practice; and in the middle
of the century these endeavours assumed more definite form. Montiano's
bloodless tragedy of _Virginia_ (1750), which was never acted, was
accompanied by a discourse endeavouring to reconcile the doctrines of the
author with the practice of the old Spanish dramatists; the play itself
was in blank verse (a metre never used by Calderon, though occasionally
by Lope), instead of the old national ballad-measures (the
romance-measure with assonance and the rhymed _redondilla_ quatrain)
preferred by the old masters among the variety of metres employed by
them. The earliest Spanish comedy in the French form (a translation only,
though written in the national metre)[67] (1751), and the first original
Spanish comedy on the same model, Nicolas Moratin's _Petimetra_
(_Petite-Maîtresse_), printed in 1726 with a critical dissertation,
likewise remained unacted. In 1770, however, the same author's
_Hormesinda_, an historic drama on a national theme and in the national
metre, but adhering to the French rules, appeared on the stage; and
similar attempts followed in tragedy by the same writer and others
(including Ayala, who ventured in 1775 to compete with Cervantes on the
theme of Numantia), and in comedy by Iriarte and Jovellanos (afterwards
minister under Godoy), who produced a sentimental comedy in Diderot's
manner.[68] But these endeavours failed to effect any change in the
popular theatre, which was with more success raised from its deepest
degradation by R. de la Cruz, a fertile author of light pieces of genuine
humour, especially _saynetes_, depicting the manners of the middle and
lower classes. In literary circles Garcia de la Huerta's voluminous
collection of the old plays (1785) gave a new impulse to dramatic
productivity, and the conflict continued between representatives of the
old school, such as Luciano Francisco Comella (1716-1779) and of the new,
such as the younger Moratin, whose comedies--of which the last and most
successful[69] was in prose--raised him to the foremost position among
the dramatists of his age. In tragedy N. de Cienfuegos likewise showed
some originality. After, however, the troubles of the French domination
and the war had come to an end, the precepts and examples of the new
school failed to reassert themselves.
Already in 1815 an active critical controversy was carried on by Böhl de
Faber against the efforts of J. Faber and Alcalá Galiano to uphold the
principles of classicism; and with the aid of the eminent actor Máiquez
the old romantic masterpieces were easily reinstated in the public
favour, which as a matter of fact they had never forfeited. The Spanish
dramatists of the 19th century, after passing, as in the instance of F.
Martinez de la Rosa and Bréton de los Herreros, from the system of
French comedy to the manner of the national drama, appear either to have
stood under the influence of the French romantic school, or to have
returned once more to the old Spanish models. Among the former class A.
Gil y Zarate, of the latter J. Zorrilla, are mentioned as specially
prominent. The most renowned Spanish dramatist at the opening of the
20th century was the veteran politician and man of letters J. Echegaray.
Meanwhile, the old religious performances are not wholly extinct in
Spain, and the relics of the solemn pageantry with which they were
associated may long continue to survive there, as in the case of the
_pasos_, which claim to have been exhibited in Holy Week at Seville for
at least three centuries. As to the theatre itself, there can be no fear
either that the imitation of foreign examples will satisfy Spanish
dramatists--especially when, like the author of _Doña Perfecta_ (Perez
Galdos), they have excellent home material of their own for
adaptation,--or that the Spanish public itself, with fine actors and
actresses still upholding the lofty traditions of the national drama,
will remain too fatigued to consume the drama unless bit by bit--in the
shape of _zarzuelas_ and similar one-act confections. Whatever may be
the future of one of the noblest of modern dramatic literatures, it may
confidently be predicted that, so long as Spain is Spain, her theatre
will not be permanently either denationalized or degraded.
(d) _Portugal._
The Portuguese drama.
The Portuguese drama in its earlier phases, especially before in the
latter part of the 14th century the nation completely achieved its
independence, seems to have followed much the same course as the
Spanish; and the religious drama in all its prevailing forms and direct
outgrowths retained its popularity even by the side of the products of
the Renaissance. In the later period of that movement translations of
classical dramas into the vernacular were stimulated by the cosmopolitan
example of George Buchanan, who for a time held a post in the university
of Coimbra; to this class of play Teive's _Johannes_ (1553) may be
supposed to have belonged. In the next generation Antonio Ferreira[70]
and others still wrote comedies more or less on the classical model. But
the rather vague title of "the Plautus of Portugal" is accorded to an
earlier comic writer, the celebrated Gil Vicente, who died about 1536,
after, it is stated, producing forty-two plays. He was the founder of
popular Portuguese comedy, and his plays were called _autos_, or by the
common name of _praticas_.[71] Among his most gifted successors are
mentioned A. Ribeiro, called _Chiado_ (the mocking-bird), who died in
1590;[72] his brother Jeronymo, B. Dias, A. Pires, J. Pinto, H. Lopes
and others. The dramatic efforts of the illustrious poet Luis de Camões
(Camoens) are relatively of slight importance; they consist of one of
the many modern versions of the _Amphitruo_, and of two other comedies,
of which the earlier (_Filodemo_) was acted at Goa in 1553, the subjects
having a romantic colour.[73] Of greater importance were the
contributions to dramatic literature of F. de Sá de Miranda, who, being
well acquainted with both Spanish and Italian life, sought early in his
career to domesticate the Italian comedy of intrigue on the Portuguese
stage;[74] but he failed to carry with him the public taste, which
preferred the _autos_ of Gil Vicente. The followers of Miranda were,
however, more successful than he had been himself, among them the
already-mentioned Antonio Ferreira; the prose plays of Jorge Ferreira de
Vasconcellos, which bear some resemblance to the Spanish _Celestina_,
are valuable as pictures of contemporary manners in city and court.[75]
The later Portuguese dramatic literature seems also to have passed
through phases corresponding to those of the Spanish, though with
special features of its own. In the 18th century Alcino Mycenio
(1728-1770), known as Domingos dos Reis Quito in everyday life, in which
his avocation was that of Allan Ramsay, was remarkably successful with a
series of plays,[76] including of course an _Inez de Castro_, which in a
subsequent adaptation by J. B. Gomes long held the national stage.
Another dramatist, of both merit and higher aspirations, was Lycidas
Cynthio (_alias_ Manoel de Figueiredo, 1725-1801).[77] But the romantic
movement was very late in coming to Portugal. Curiously enough, one of
its chief representatives, the viscount da Almeida Garrett, exhibited
his sympathy with French, revolutionary and anti-English ideas by a
tragedy on the subject of Cato;[78] but his later works were mainly on
national subjects.[79] The expansive tendencies of later Portuguese
dramatic literature are illustrated by the translations of A. F. de
Castilho, who even ventured upon Goethe's _Faust_ (1872). Among
19th-century dramatists are to be noted Pereira da Cunha, R. Cordeiro,
E. Biester, L. Palmeirin, and Garrett's disciple F. G. de Amorim, by
whom both political and social themes have been freely treated. The
reaction against romanticism observable in Portuguese poetic literature
can hardly fail to affect (or perhaps has already affected) the growth
of the national drama; for the receptive qualities of both are not less
striking than the productive.
(e) _France._
The French regular drama.
France was the only country, besides Italy, in which classical tragedy
was naturalized. In 1531 the Benedictine Barthélemy of Loches printed a
_Christus Xylonicus_; and a very notable impulse was given both to the
translation and to the imitation of ancient models by a series of
efforts made in the university of Paris and other French places of
learning. The most successful of these attempts was the _Johannes
Baptistes_ of George Buchanan, who taught in Paris for five years and at
a rather later date resided at Bordeaux, where in 1540 he composed this
celebrated tragedy (afterwards translated into four or five modern
languages), in which it is now ascertained that he had in view the trial
and condemnation of Sir Thomas More. He also wrote _Jephthah_, and
translated into Latin the _Medea_ and _Alcestis_ of Euripides. At a
rather later date the great scholar M. A. Muret (Muretus) produced his
_Julius Caesar_, a work perhaps superior in correctness to Buchanan's
tragic masterpiece, but inferior to it in likeness to life. About the
same time the enthusiasm of the Paris classicists showed itself in
several translations of Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedies into French
verse.[80]
Jodelle.
Thus the beginnings of the regular drama in France, which, without
absolutely determining, potently swayed its entire course, came to
connect themselves directly with the great literary movement of the
Renaissance. Du Bellay sounded the note of attack which converted that
movement in France into an endeavour to transform the national
literature; and in Ronsard the classical school of poetry put forward
its conquering hero and sovereign lawgiver. Among the disciples who
gathered round Ronsard, and with him formed the "Pleiad" of French
literature, Étienne Jodelle, the reformer of the French theatre, soon
held a distinguished place. The stage of this period left ample room for
the enterprise of this youthful writer. The popularity of the old
entertainments had reached its height when Louis XII., in his conflict
with Pope Julius II., had not scrupled to call in the aid of Pierre
Gringoire (Gringon), and when the _Mère sotte_ had mockingly masqueraded
in the petticoats of Holy Church. In the reign of Francis I. the
Inquisition, and on occasion the king himself, had to some extent
succeeded in repressing the audacity of the actors, whose follies were
at the same time an utter abomination in the eyes of the Huguenots. For
a time the very mysteries of the Brethren of the Passion had been
prohibited; while the moralities and farces had sunk to an almost
contemptible level. Yet to this reign belong the contributions to
farce-literature of three writers so distinguished as Rabelais
(non-extant), Clément Marot and Queen Margaret of Navarre. Meanwhile
isolated translations of Italian[81] as well as classical dramas had in
literature begun the movement which Jodelle now transferred to the stage
itself. His tragedy _Cléopatre captive_ was produced there on the same
day as his comedy _L'Eugène_, in 1552, his _Didon se sacrifiant_
following in 1558. Thus at a time when a national theatre was perhaps
impossible in a country distracted by civil and religious conflicts,
whose monarchy had not yet welded together a number of provinces
attached each to its own traditions, and whose population, especially in
the capital, was enervated by frivolity or enslaved by fanaticism, was
born that long-lived artificial growth, the so-called classical tragedy
of France. For French comedy, though subjected to the same influences as
tragedy, had a national basis upon which to proceed, and its history is
partly that of a modification of old popular forms.
French tragedy in the 16th century.
The history of French tragedy begins with the _Cléopâtre captive_, in
the representation of which the author, together with other members of
the "Pleiad," took part. It is a tragedy in the manner of Seneca, devoid
of action and provided with a ghost and a chorus. Though mainly written
in the five-foot Iambic couplet, it already contains passages in the
Alexandrine metre, which soon afterwards J. de La Péruse by his _Médée_
(pr. 1556) established in French tragedy, and which Jodelle employed in
his _Didon_. Numerous tragedies followed in the same style by various
authors, among whom Gabriel Bounyn produced the first French regular
tragedy on a subject neither Greek nor Roman,[82] and the brothers de la
Taille,[83] and J. Grévin,[84] distinguished themselves by their style.
In the reign of Charles IX. a vain attempt was made by Nicolas Filleul
to introduce the pastoral style of the Italians into French tragedy;[85]
and the Brotherhood of the Passion was intermingling with pastoral plays
its still continued reproductions of the old entertainments, and the
religious drama making its expiring efforts, among which T. Le Coq's
interesting mystery of _Cain_ (1580) should be noted. Beza's _Abraham
sacrifiant_ (1550), J. de Coignac's _Goliath_ (dedicated to Edward VI.),
Rivandeau's _Haman_ (1561), belong to a group of Biblical tragedies,
inspired by Calvinist influences. But these more and more approached to
the examples of the classical school, which, in spite of all
difficulties and rivalries, prevailed. Among its followers Montchrétien
exhibited unusual vigour of rhetoric,[86] and in R. Garnier French
tragedy reached the greatest height in nobility and dignity of style, as
well as in the exhibition of dramatic passion, to which it attained
before Corneille. In his tragedies[87] choruses are still interspersed
among the long Alexandrine tirades of the dialogue.
Comedy under Italian influence.
During this period comedy had likewise been influenced by classical
models; but the distance was less between the national farces and
Terence, than between the mysteries and moralities, and Seneca and the
Greeks. _L'Eugène_ differs little in style from the more elaborate of
the old farces; and while it satirizes the foibles of the clergy without
any appreciable abatement of the old licence, its theme is the favourite
burden of the French comic theatre in all times--_le cocuage_. The
examples, however, which directly facilitated the productivity of the
French comic dramatists of this period, among whom Jean de la Taille was
the first to attempt a regular comedy in prose,[88] were those of the
Italian stage, which in 1576 established a permanent colony in France,
destined to survive there till the close of the 17th century, by which
time it had adopted the French language, and was ready to coalesce with
French actors, without, however, relinquishing all remembrance of its
origin. R. Belleau, a member of the "Pleiad," produced a comedy in which
the type (already approached by Jodelle) of the swaggering captain
appears,[89] J. Grévin copied Italian intrigue, characters and
manners;[90] O. de Turnèbe (d. 1581) borrowed the title of one Italian
play[91] and perhaps parts of the plots of others; the Florentine F.
d'Amboise (d. 1558) produced versions of two Italian comedies;[92] and
the foremost French comic poet of the century, P. de Larivey, likewise
an Italian born (of the name of Pietro Giunto), openly professed to
imitate the poets of his native country. His plays are more or less
literal translations of L. Dolce,[93] Secchi[94] and other Italian
dramatists; and this lively and witty author, to whom Molière owes much,
thus connects two of the most important and successful growths of the
modern comic drama.
The close conjunction between the history of a living dramatic
literature and that of the theatre can least of all be ignored in the
case of France, where the actor's art has gone through so ample an
evolution, and where the theatre has so long and continuously formed an
important part of the national life. By the middle of the 16th century
not only had theatrical representations, now quite emancipated from
clerical control, here and there already become matters of speculation
and business, but the acting profession was beginning to organize itself
as such; strolling companies of actors had become a more or less
frequent experience; and the attitude of the church and of civic
respectability were once more coming to be systematically hostile to the
stage and its representatives.
French tragedy and comedy in the 17th century before Corneille.
Before, however, either tragedy or comedy in France entered into the
period of their history when genius was to illuminate both of them with
creations of undying merit, and before the theatre had associated itself
enduringly with the artistic and literary divisions of court and society
and the people at large, the country had passed through a new phase of
the national life. When the troubles and terrors of the great civil and
religious wars of the 16th century were over at last, they were found to
have produced a reaction towards culture and refinement which spread
from certain spheres of society whose influence was for a time
prevailing. The seal had been set upon the results of the Renaissance by
Malherbe, the father of French style. The masses meanwhile continued to
solace or distract their weariness and their sufferings with the help of
the accredited ministers of that half-cynical gaiety which has always
lighted up the darkest hours of French popular life. In the troublous
days preceding Richelieu's definitive accession to power (1624), the
_tabarinades_--a kind of street dialogue recalling the earliest days of
the popular drama--had made the Pont-Neuf the favourite theatre of the
Parisian populace. Meanwhile the influence of Spain, which Henry IV. had
overcome in politics, had throughout his reign and afterwards been
predominant in other spheres, and not the least in that of literature.
The _stilo culto_, of which Gongora was the native Spanish, Marino the
Italian, and Lyly the English representative, asserted its dominion over
the favourite authors of French society; the pastoral romance of Honoré
d'Urfé--the text-book of pseudo-pastoral gallantry--was the parent of
the romances of the Scudérys, de La Calprenède and Mme de La Fayette;
the Hôtel de Rambouillet was in its glory; the true (not the false)
_précieuses_ sat on the heights of intellectual society; and J. L. G. de
Balzac (ridiculed in the earliest French dramatic parody)[95] and
Voiture were the dictators of its literature. Much of the French drama
of this age is of the same kind as its romance-literature, like which it
fell under the polite castigation of Boileau's satire. Heroic love
(quite a technical passion), "fertile in tender sentiments," seized hold
of the theatre as well as of the romances; and La Calprenède, G. de
Scudéry[96] and his sister and others were equally fashionable in both
species. The Gascon Cyrano de Bergerac, though not altogether
insignificant as a dramatist,[97] gained his chief literary reputation
by a Rabelaisian fiction. Meanwhile, Spanish and Italian models
continued to influence both branches of the drama. Everybody knew by
heart Gongora's version of the story of "young Pyramus and his love
Thisbe," as dramatized by Th. Viaud (1590-1626); and the sentiment of
Tristan[98] (1601-1655) overpowered Herod on the stage, and drew tears
from Cardinal Richelieu in the audience. J. Mairet was noted for
superior vigour.[99] P. Du Ryer's style is described as, while otherwise
superior to that of his contemporaries, Italian in its defects. A
mixture of the forms of classical comedy with elements of Spanish and of
the Italian pastoral was attempted with great temporary success by A.
Hardy, a playwright who thanked Heaven that he knew the precepts of his
art while preferring to follow the demands of his trade. The mixture of
styles begun by him was carried on by the marquis de Racan,[100] J. de
Rotrou and others; and among these comedies of intrigue in the Spanish
manner the earliest efforts of Corneille himself[101] are to be classed.
Rotrou's noteworthier productions[102] are later in date than the event
which marks an epoch in the history of the French drama, the appearance
of Corneille's _Cid_ (1636).
Corneille.
P. Corneille is justly revered as the first, and in some respects the
unequalled, great master of French tragedy, whatever may have been
unsound in his theories, or defective in his practice. The attempts of
his predecessors had been without life, because they lacked really
tragic characters and the play of really tragic passions; while their
style had been either pedantically imitative or a medley of plagiarisms.
He conquered tragedy at once for the national theatre and for the
national literature--and this, not by a long tentative process of
production, but by a few masterpieces, which may be held to be
comprehended within the ten years 1636 to 1646; for in his many later
tragedies he never again proved fully equal to himself. The French
tragedy, of which the great age begins with the _Cid_, _Horace_,
_Cinna_, _Polyeucte_ and _Rodogune_, was not, whatever it professed to
be, a copy of the classical tragedy of Greeks or Romans, or an imitation
of the Italian imitations of these; nor, though in his later tragedies
Corneille depended less and less upon characters, and more and more,
after the fashion of the Spaniards, upon situations, and even upon
spectacle, were the forms of the Spanish drama able to assert their
dominion over the French tragic stage. The mould of French tragedy was
cast by Corneille; but the creative power of his genius was unable to
fill it with more than a few examples. His range of passions and
characters was limited; he preferred, he said, the reproach of having
made his women too heroic to that of having made his men effeminate. His
actions inclined too much to the exhibition of conflicts political
rather than broadly ethical in their significance. The defects of his
style are of less moment; but in this, as in other respects, he was,
with all his strength and brilliancy, not one of those rarest of artists
who are at the same time the example and the despair of their
successors. The _examens_ which he printed of all his plays up to 1660
show how much self-criticism (though it may not always be as in this
case conscious) contributes to the true fertility of genius.
In comedy also Corneille begins the first great original epoch of French
dramatic literature; for it was to him that Molière owed the inspiration
of the tone and style which he made those of the higher forms of French
comedy. But _Le Menteur_ (the parent, with its sequel, of a numerous
dramatic progeny[103]) was itself derived from a Spanish original,[104]
which it did not (as was the case with the _Cid_) transform into
something new. French tragi-comedy Corneille can hardly be said to have
invented;[105] and of the mongrel growths of sentimental comedy and of
domestic drama or _drame_, he rather suggested than exemplified the
conditions.
Racine.
The tragic art of Racine supplements rather than surpasses that of his
older contemporary. His works reflect the serene and settled formality
of an age in which the sun of monarchy shone with an effulgence no
clouds seemed capable of obscuring, and in which the life of a nation
seemed reducible to the surroundings of a court. The tone of the poetic
literature of such an age is not necessarily unreal, because the range
of its ideas is limited, and because its forms seem to exist by an
immutable authority. That Racine should permanently hold the position
which belongs to him in French dramatic literature is due to the fact
that to him it was given to present these forms--the forms approved by
his age--in what may reasonably be called perfection; and, from the
point of view of workmanship, Sophocles could not have achieved more.
What his plays contain is another question. They suit themselves so well
to the successive phases in the life of Louis XIV., that Madame de
Sévigné described Racine as having in his later years loved God as he
had formerly loved his mistresses; and this sally at all events
indicates the range of passions which inspired his tragic muse. His
heroes are all of one type--that of a gracious gloriousness; his
heroines vary in their fortunes, but they are all the "trophies of
love,"[106] with the exception of the scriptural figures, which stand
apart from the rest.[107] T. Corneille, Campistron, Joseph Duché
(1668-1704), Antoin de Lafosse (c. 1653-1708) and Quinault were mere
followers of one or both of the great masters of tragedy, though the
last named achieved a reputation of his own in the bastard species of
the opera.
Characteristics of French classical tragedy.
The type of French tragedy thus established, like everything else which
formed part of the "age of Louis XIV.," proclaimed itself as the
definitively settled model of its kind, and was accepted as such by a
submissive world. Proud of its self-imposed fetters, French tragedy
dictatorially denied the liberty of which it had deprived itself to the
art of which it claimed to furnish the highest examples. Yet, though
calling itself classical, it had not caught the essential spirit of the
tragedy of the Greeks. The elevation of tone which characterizes the
serious drama of the age of Louis XIV. is a true elevation, but its
heights do not lose themselves in a sphere peopled by the myths of a
national religion, still less in the region of great thoughts which ask
Heaven to stoop to the aspirations and the failures of man. The
personages of this drama are conventional like its themes, but the
convention is with itself only; Orestes and Iphigenia have not brought
with them the cries of the stern goddesses and the flame on the altar of
Artemis; their passions like their speech are cadenced by a modern
measure. In construction, the simplicity and regularity of the ancient
models are stereotyped into a rigid etiquette by the exigencies of the
court-theatre, which is but an apartment of the palace. The unities of
time and place, with the Greeks mere rules of convenience, French
tragedy imposes upon itself as a permanent yoke. The Euripidean prologue
is judiciously exchanged for the exposition of the first act, and the
lyrical element essential to Greek tragedy is easily suppressed in its
would-be copy; lyrical passages still occur in some of Corneille's early
masterpieces,[108] but the chorus is consistently banished, to reappear
only in Racine's latest works[109] as a scholastic experiment
appropriate to a conventual atmosphere. Its uses for explanation and
comment are served by the expedient, which in its turn becomes
conventional, of the conversations with _confidants_ and _confidantes_,
which more than sufficiently supply the foil of general sentiments. The
epical element is allowed full play in narrative passages, more
especially in those which relate parts of the catastrophe,[110] and,
while preserving the stage intact from realisms, suit themselves to the
generally rhetorical character of this species of the tragic drama. This
character impressed itself more and more upon the tragic art of a
rhetorical nation in an age when the loftiest themes were in the pulpit
receiving the most artistic oratorical treatment, and developed in the
style of French classical tragedy the qualities which cause it to become
something between prose and poetry--or to appear (in the phrase of a
French critic) like prose in full dress. The force of this description
is borne out by the fact that the distinction between the versification
of French tragedy and that of French comedy seems at times
imperceptible.
Voltaire.
The universal genius of Voltaire found it necessary to shine in all
branches of literature, and in tragedy to surpass predecessors whom his
own authority declared to have surpassed the efforts of the Attic muse.
He succeeded in impressing the world with the belief that his
innovations had imparted a fresh vitality to French tragedy; in truth,
however, they represent no essential advance in art, but rather
augmented the rhetorical tendency which paralyses true dramatic life.
Such life as his plays possess lies in their political and social
sentiments, their invective against tyranny,[111] and their exposure of
fanaticism.[112] In other respects his versatility was barren of
enduring results. He might take his themes from French history,[113] or
from Chinese,[114] or Egyptian,[115] or Syrian,[116] from the days of
the Epigoni[117] or from those of the Crusades;[118] he might appreciate
Shakespeare, with a more or less partial comprehension of his strength,
and condescendingly borrow from and improve the barbarian.[119] But he
added nothing to French tragedy where it was weakest--in character; and
where it was strongest--in diction--he never equalled Corneille in fire
or Racine in refinement. While the criticism to which French tragedy in
this age at last began to be subjected has left unimpaired the real
titles to immortality of its great masters, the French theatre itself
has all but buried in respectful oblivion the dramatic works bearing the
name of Voltaire--a name persistently belittled, but second to none in
the history of modern progress and of modern civilization.
French classical tragedy in its decline.
As it is of relatively little interest to note the ramifications of an
art in its decline, the contrasts need not be pursued among the
contemporaries of Voltaire, between his imitator Bernard Joseph Saurin
(1706-1781), Saurin's royalist rival de Belloy, Racine's imitator
Lagrange-Chancel and Voltaire's own would-be rival, the "terrible"
Crébillon the elder, who professed to vindicate to French tragedy,
already mistress of the heavens through Corneille, and of the earth
through Racine, Pluto's supplementary realm, but who, though thus
essaying to carry tragedy lower, failed to carry it farther. In the
latter part of the 18th century French classical tragedy as a literary
growth was dying a slow death, however numerous might be the leaves
which sprouted from the decaying tree. Its form had been permanently
fixed; and even Shakespeare, as manipulated by Ducis[120]--an author
whose tastes were better than his times--failed to bring about a change.
"It is a Moor, not a Frenchman, who has written this play," cried a
spectator of Ducis' _Othello_ (1791); but Talma's conviction was almost
as strong as his capacity was great for convincing his public; and he
certainly did much to prepare the influence which Shakespeare was
gradually to assert over the French drama, and which was aided by
translations, more especially that of Pierre Letourneur (1736-1788),
which had attracted the sympathy of Diderot and the execrations of the
aged Voltaire.[121] Meanwhile, the command which classical French
tragedy continued to assert over the stage was due in part, no doubt, to
the love of Roman drapery--not always abundant, but always in the grand
style--which characterized the Revolution, and which was by the
Revolution handed down to the Empire. It was likewise, and more
signally, due to the great actors who freed the tragic stage from much
of its artificiality and animated it by their genius. No great artist
has ever more generously estimated the labours of a predecessor than
Talma judged those of Le Kain; but it was Talma himself whose genius was
pre-eminently fitted to reproduce the great figures of antiquity in the
mimic world, which, like the world outside, both required and possessed
its Caesar. He, like Rachel after him, reconciled French classical
tragedy with nature; and it is upon the art of great original actors
such as these that the theatrical future of this form of the drama in
France depends. Mere whims of fashion--even when inspired by political
feeling--will not waft back to it a real popularity; nor will occasional
literary aftergrowths, however meritorious, such as the admirable
_Lucrèce_ of F. Ponsard and the attempts of even more recent writers,
suffice to re-establish a living union between it and the progress of
the national literature.
Comedy.
Molière.
The rival influences under which classical tragedy has after a long
struggle virtually become a thing of the past in French literature are
also to be traced in the history of French comedy, which under the
co-operation of other influences produced a wide variety of growths. The
germs of most of these--though not of all--are to be found in the works
of the most versatile, the most sure-footed, and, in some respects, the
most consummate master of the comic drama whom the world has
known--Molière. What Molière found in existence was a comedy of
intrigue, derived from Spanish or Italian examples, and the elements of
a comedy of character, in French and more especially in Italian farce
and ballet-pantomime. Corneille's _Menteur_ had pointed the way to a
fuller combination of character with intrigue, and in this direction
Molière's genius exercised the height of its creative powers. After
beginning with farces, he produced in the earliest of his plays (from
1652), of which more than fragments remain, comedies of intrigue which
are at the same time marvellously lively pictures of manners, and then
proceeded, with the _École des maris_ (1661), to begin a long series of
masterpieces of comedy of character. Yet even these, the chief of which
are altogether unrivalled in dramatic literature, do not exhaust the
variety of his productions. To define the range of his art is as
difficult as to express in words the essence of his genius. For though
he has been copied ever since he wrote, neither his spirit nor his
manner has descended in full to any of his copyists, whole schools of
whom have missed elements of both. A Molière can only be judged in his
relations to the history of comedy at large. He was indeed the inheritor
of many forms and styles--remaining a stranger to those of Old Attic
comedy only, rooted as it was in the political life of a free imperial
city; though even the rich extravagances of Aristophanes' burlesque was
not left wholly unreproduced by him. Molière is both a satirist and a
humorist; he displays at times the sentiments of a loyal courtier, at
others that gay spirit of opposition which is all but indispensable to a
popular French wit. His comedies offer elaborate and subtle--even
tender--pictures of human character in its eternal types, lively
sketches of social follies and literary extravagances, and broad appeals
to the ordinary sources of vulgar merriment. Light and perspicuous in
construction, he is master of the delicate play of irony, the
penetrating force of wit, and the expansive gaiety of frolicsome fun.
Faithful to the canons of artistic taste, and under the sure guidance of
true natural humour, his style suits itself to every species attempted
by him. His morality is the reverse of rigid, but its aberrations are
not those of prurience, nor its laws those of pretence; and, wholly free
as he was from the didactic aim which is foreign to all true dramatic
representation, the services rendered by him to his art are not the less
services rendered to society, concerning which the laughter of genuine
comedy tells the truth. He raised the comedy of character out of the
lower sphere of caricature, and in his greatest creations subordinated
to the highest ends of all dramatic composition the plots he so
skilfully built, and the pictures of the manners he so faithfully
reproduced.
Molière's contemporaries and successors.
Even among the French comic dramatists of this age there must have been
many who "were not aware" that Molière was its greatest poet. For though
he had made the true path luminous to them, their efforts were still
often of a tentative kind, and one was reviving _Pathelin_ while another
was translating the _Andria_. A more unique attempt was made in one of
the very few really modern versions of an Aristophanic comedy, which
deserves to be called an original copy--the _Plaideurs_ of Racine. The
tragic poets Quinault and Campistron likewise wrote comedies, one[122]
or more of which furnished materials to contemporary English
dramatists, as did one of the felicitous plays in which Boursault
introduced Mercury and Aesop into the theatrical _salon_.[123] Antoine
Montfleury (1640-1685), Baron and Dancourt, who were actors like
Molière, likewise wrote comedies. But if the mantle of Molière can be
said to have fallen upon any of his contemporaries or successors, this
honour must be ascribed to J. F. Regnard, who imitated the great master
in both themes and characters,[124] while the skilfulness of his plots,
and his gaiety of the treatment even of subjects tempting into the
by-path of sentimental comedy,[125] entitle him to be regarded as a
comic poet of original genius. With him C. R. Dufresny occasionally
collaborated.
In the next generation (that of Voltaire) comedy gradually--but only
gradually--surrendered for a time the very essence of its vitality to
the seductions of a hybrid species, which disguised its identity under
more than a single name. A. R. le Sage, who as a comic dramatist at
first followed successfully in the footsteps of Molière, proved himself
on the stage as well as in picturesque fiction a keen observer and
inimitable satirist of human life.[126] The light texture of the playful
and elegant art of J. B. L. Gresset was shown on the stage in a
character comedy of merit;[127] and in a comedy which reveals something
of his pointed wit, A. Piron produced something like a new type of
enduring ridiculousness.[128] P. C. de Marivaux, the French _Spectator_,
is usually supposed to have formed the connecting link between the "old"
French comedy and the "new" and bastard variety. Yet, though his minute
analysis of the tender passion excited the scorn of Voltaire, it should
not be overlooked that in _marivaudage_ proper the wit holds the balance
to the sentiment, and that in some of this frequently misjudged writer's
earlier and most delightful plays the elegance and gaiety of diction are
as irresistible as the pathetic sentiment, which is in fact rather an
ingredient in his comedy than the pervading characteristic of it.[129]
Some of the comedies of P. H. Destouches no doubt have a serious basis,
and in his later plays he comes near to a kind of drama in which the
comic purpose has been virtually submerged.[130] The writer who is
actually to be credited with the transition to sentimental comedy, and
who was fully conscious of the change which he was helping to effect,
was Nivelle de La Chaussée, in whose hands French comedy became a
champion of the sanctity of marriage, and reproduced the sentiments--in
one instance even the characters--of Richardson.[131] To his play _La
Fausse Antipathie_ the author supplied a _critique_, amounting to an
apology for the new species of which it was designed as an example.
The new species known as _comédie larmoyante_ was now fairly in the
ascendant; and it would be easy to show how even Voltaire, who had
deprecated the innovation, had to yield to a power greater than his own,
and introduced the sentimental element into some of his comedies.[132]
The further step, by which _comédie larmoyante_ was transformed into
_tragédie bourgeoise_, from which the comic element was to all intents
and purposes extruded, was taken by a great French writer, D. Diderot;
to whose influence it was largely due that the species which had
attained to this consummation for more than a generation ruled supreme
in the dramatic literature of Europe. But the final impulse, as Diderot
himself virtually acknowledged in the _entretiens_ subjoined by him to
his _Fils naturel_ (1757), had been given by a far humbler citizen of
the world of letters, the author of _The London Merchant_. Diderot's own
plays were a literary rather than a theatrical success. _Le Fils naturel
ou les épreuves de la vertu_ was not publicly performed till 1771, and
then only in deference to the determination of a single actor of the
Français (Molé); nor was the performance of it repeated. Diderot's
second play, _Le Père de famille_, printed in 1758 with a _Discours sur
la poésie dramatique_, went through a few public performances in 1761;
and a later revival was unsuccessful. But "at a distance," as was well
said, the effect of Diderot's endeavours, the earlier in particular, was
extremely great, and Lessing, though very critical as to particular
points, greatly helped to spread it. Diderot had for the first time
consciously sought to proclaim the theatre an agency of social reform,
and to entrust to it as its task the propagation of the gospel of
philanthropy. Though the execution of his dramatic works fell far short
of his aims; though Madame de Staël was not far wrong in denouncing them
as exhibiting not nature itself, but "the affectation of nature," yet
they contained, in a measure almost unequalled in the history of the
modern drama, the fermenting element which never seems to subside. Their
author announced them as examples of a third dramatic form--the _genre
sérieux_--which he declared to be the consummation of the dramatic art.
Making war upon the frigid artificiality of classical tragedy, he
banished verse from the new species. The effect of these plays was
intended to spring from their truth to nature--a truth such as no
spectator could mistake, and which should bring home its moral teachings
to the business as well as the bosoms of all. The theatre was to become
a real and realistic school of the principles of society and of the
conduct of life--it was, in other words, to usurp functions with which
it has no concern, and to essay the direct reformation of mankind. The
idea was neither new nor just; but its speciousness will probably
continue to commend it to many enthusiastic minds, whensoever and in
whatsoever shape it is revived.
The comedy of the Revolution and the first empire.
Vaudevilles, etc.
From this point the history of the French drama becomes that of a
conflict between an enfeebled artistic school and a tendency which is
hardly to be dignified by the name of a school at all. Among the
successful dramatists following on Diderot may be mentioned the critical
and versatile J. F. Marmontel, and more especially M. J. Sedaine, who
though chiefly working for the opera, produced two comedies of
acknowledged merit.[133] P. A. C. de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), who for
his early sentimental plays,[134] in which he imitated Diderot, invented
the appellation _drame_--so convenient in its vagueness that it became
the accepted name of the hybrid species to which they belonged--in two
works of a very different kind, the famous _Barbier de Séville_ and the
still more famous _Mariage de Figaro_, boldly carried comedy back into
its old Spanish atmosphere of intrigue; but, while surpassing all his
predecessors in the skill with which he constructed his frivolous plots,
he drew his characters with a lightness and sureness of touch peculiar
to himself, animated his dialogue with an unparalleled brilliancy of
wit, and seasoned action as well as dialogue with a political and social
meaning, which caused his epigrams to become proverbs, and which marks
his _Figaro_ as a herald of the Revolution. Such plays as these were ill
suited to the rule of the despot whose vigilance could not overlook
their significance. The comedy of the empire is, in the hands of Collin
d'Harleville, Louis Picard (1769-1828), A. Duval, Étienne and others,
mainly a harmless comedy of manners; nor was the attempted innovation of
N. Lemercier--who was fain to invent a new species, that of historical
comedy--more than a flattering self-delusion. The theatre had its share
in all the movements and changes which ensued in France; though the most
important revolution which the drama itself was to undergo was not one
of wholly native origin. Those branches of the drama which belong
specifically to the history of the opera, or which associate themselves
with it, are here passed by. Among them was the _vaudeville_ (from Val
de Vire in Calvados), which began as an interspersion of pantomime with
the airs of popular songs, and which, after the Italian masks had been
removed from it, was cultivated by Ponsard and Marmontel, while Sedaine
wrote a didactic poem on the subject (1756). Sedaine was the father of
the _opéra-comique_ proper;[135] Marmontel,[136] as well as
Rousseau,[137] likewise composed _opérettes_--a smaller sort of opera,
at first of the pastoral variety; and these flexible species easily
entered into combination. The melodrama proper, of which the invention
is also attributed to Rousseau,[138] in its latter development became
merely a drama accentuated by music, though usually in little need of
any accentuation.
The stage.
Transition to the romantic school.
The chief home of the regular drama, however, demanded efforts of
another kind. At the Théâtre Français, or Comédie Française, whose
history as that of a single company of actors had begun in 1680, the
party-strife of the times made itself audible; and the most prominent
tragic poet of the Revolution, M. J. de Chénier, a disciple of Voltaire
in dramatic poetry as well as in political philosophy, wrote for the
national stage the historical drama--with a political moral[139]--in
which in the memorable year 1789 the actor Talma achieved his first
complete triumph. But the victorious Revolution proclaimed among other
liberties that of the theatres in Paris, of which soon not less than 50
were open. In 1807 the empire restricted the number to 9, and reinstated
the Théâtre Français in sole possession (or nearly such) of the right of
performing the classic drama. No writer of note was, however, tempted or
inspired by the rewards and other encouragements offered by Napoleon to
produce such a classic tragedy as the emperor would have willingly
stamped from out of the earth. The tragedies of C. Delavigne represent
the transition from the expiring efforts of the classical to the
ambitious beginnings of the romantic school of the French drama.
The romantic school.
Of modern romantic drama in France it must suffice to say that it
derives some of its characteristics from the general movement of
romanticism which in various ways and at various points of time
transformed nearly every modern European literature, others from the
rhetorical tendency which is a French national feature. Victor Hugo was
the founder whom it followed in a spirit of high emprise to success upon
success, his own being the most conspicuous of all;[140] A. Dumas the
elder its unshrinking middleman. The marvellous fire and grandeur of
genius of the former, always in extremes but often most sublime at the
height of danger, was nowhere more signally such than in the drama;
Dumas was a Briareus, working, however, with many hands besides his own.
Together with them may, with more or less precision, be classed in the
romantic school of dramatists A. de Vigny[141] and George Sand,[142]
neither of whom, however, attained to the highest rank in the drama, and
Jules Sandeau;[143] A. de Musset, whose originality pervades all his
plays, but whose later works, more especially in his prose "proverbs"
and pieces of a similar kind, have a flavour of a delicacy altogether
indescribable;[144] perhaps also P. Mérimée (1803-1870), who invented
not only Spanish dramas but a Spanish dramatist, and who was never more
audacious than when he seemed most _naïf_.[145]
Modern schools.
The romantic school was not destined to exercise a permanent control
over French public taste; but it can hardly be said to have been
overthrown by the brief classical revival begun by F. Ponsard, and
continued, though in closer contact with modern ideas, both by him[146]
and by E. Augier, a dramatist who gradually attained to an extraordinary
effectiveness in the self-restrained treatment of social as well as of
historical themes.[147] While the theatrical fecundity and the
remarkable constructive ability of E. Scribe[148] supplied a long series
of productions attesting the rapid growth of the playwright's mastery
over the secrets of his craft the name of his competitors is legion.
Among them may be mentioned, if only as the authors of two of the most
successful plays of the historical species produced in the century, two
writers of great eminence--C. Delavigne[149] and E. Legouvé.[150] Later
developments of the drama bore the impress of a period of social decay,
prepared to probe its own sufferings, while glad at times to take refuge
in the gaiety traditional in France in her more light-hearted days, but
which even then had not yet deserted either French social life or the
theatre which reflected it. After a fashion which would have startled
even Diderot, while recalling his efforts in the earnestness of its
endeavour to arouse moral interests to which the theatre had long been a
stranger, A. Dumas the younger set himself to reform society by means of
the stage.[151] But the technical skill which he and contemporary
dramatists displayed in the execution of their self-imposed task was
such as had been undreamt of by Diderot. O. Feuillet, more eminent as a
novelist than on the stage, applied himself, though with the aid of
fewer prefaces, to the solution of the same or similar problems; while
the extraordinary versatility of V. Sardou and his unfailing
constructive skill was applied by him to almost every kind of serious,
or serio-comic, drama--even the most solid of all.[152] In the same
period, while E. Pailleron revived some of the most characteristic
tendencies of the best French satirical comedy in ridiculing the pompous
pretentiousness of learning for its own sake,[153] the light-hearted
gaiety of E. Labiche changed into something not altogether similar in
the productions of the comic muse of L. Halévy and H. Meilhac, ranging
from the licence of the musical burlesque which was the congenial
delight of the later days of the Second Empire to a species of comedy in
which the ingredients of bitterness and even of sadness found a
place.[154]
Tendencies of the drama and of the theatre in France.
Dramatic criticism in France has had a material share in the maintenance
of a deep as well as wide national interest in the preservation of a high
standard of excellence both in the performance of plays and in the plays
themselves. Among its modern representatives the foremost place would
probably be by common consent allowed to F. Sarcey, whose Monday
theatrical _feuilleton_ in the _Temps_ was long awaited week by week as
an oracle of dramaturgy. But he was only the first among equals, and the
successor and the predecessor of writers who have at least sought to be
equal to a function of real public importance. For it seems hardly within
the range of probability to suppose that the theatre will for many a
generation to come lose the hold which it has established over the
intellectual and moral sympathies of nearly the whole of the educated--to
say nothing of a great part of the half-educated--population of France.
This does not, of course, imply that the creative activity of French
dramatic literature is certain to endure. Since the great changes set in
which were consequent upon the disastrous war of 1870, French dramatic
literature has reflected more than one phase of national sentiment and
opinion, and has represented the aspirations, the sympathies and the
philosophy of life of more than one class in the community. Thus it has
had its episodes of reaction in the midst of an onward flow of which it
would be difficult to predict the end. The tendency of what can only
vaguely be described as the naturalistic school of writers has
corresponded to that even more prominent in the dramatic literatures of
certain other European nations; but it must be allowed that a new poetic
will have to be constructed if the freedom of development which the
dramatic, like all other arts, is entitled to claim is to be reconciled
to laws deducible from the whole previous history of the drama. The
reaction towards earlier forms has asserted itself in various
ways--through the poetic plays of the later years of F. Coppée; in the
success (notable for reasons other than artistic) of Vicomte H. de
Bornier's first tragedy; and of late more especially in the
dramas--highly original and truly romantic in both form and treatment--of
E. Rostand.
The art of acting is not altogether dependent upon the measure of
contemporary literary productivity, even in France, where the connexion
between dramatic literature and the stage has perhaps been more
continuously intimate than in many other countries. Talma and Mlle Mars
flourished in one of the most barren ages of the French literary drama;
and though this cannot be asserted of the two most brilliant stars of
the French 19th century tragic stage, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, or of
their comic contemporaries from Frédérick-Lemaître down to types less
unique than the "Talma of the boulevards," the constantly accumulating
experience of the successive schools of acting in France may here ensure
to the art a future not less notable than its past. Moreover, the French
theatre has long been, and is more than ever likely to continue, an
affair of the state as well as of the nation; and the judicious policy
of not leaving the chief theatres at the mercy of shifting fashion and
the base demands of idleness and sensuality will remain the surest
guarantee for the maintenance of a high standard both in principle and
in practice. So long as France continues to maintain her ascendancy over
other nations in matters of taste, and in much else that adorns,
brightens and quickens social life, the predominant influence of the
French theatre over the theatres of other nations is likewise assured.
But dramatic literature is becoming international to a degree hardly
dreamt of half a century ago; and the distinctive development of the
French theatre cannot fail to be affected by the success or failure of
the national drama in retaining and developing its own most
characteristic qualities. Its history shows periods of marvellously
rapid advance, of hardly less swift decline, and of frequent though at
times fitful recovery. Its future may be equally varied; but it will
remain not less dependent on the conditions which in every people,
ancient or modern, have proved to be indispensable to national vigour
and vitality. (A. W. W.)
_Recent French Drama._--The last twenty-five years of the 19th century
witnessed an important change in the constructive methods, as well as in
the moral tendencies, of the French playwrights. Of the two leading
dramatists who reigned supreme over the _haute comédie_ in 1875, one,
Émile Augier, had almost ended his career, but the other, Alexandre
Dumas, was to maintain his ascendancy for many years longer. Sardou's
fertility of invention, and extraordinary cleverness at manipulating a
complicated intrigue, were also greatly admired, and much was expected
from Edouard Pailleron's brilliant and--as it seemed--inexhaustible wit
in satirizing the whims and weaknesses of high-born and highly-cultured
society. Alexandre Dumas had created and still monopolized the problem
play, of which _Le Demi-monde_, _Le Fils naturel_, _La Question
d'argent_, _Les Idées de Madame Aubray_, _La Femme de Claude_, _Monsieur
Alphonse_, _La Visite de noces_, _L'Étrangère_, _Francillon_ and
_Denise_ may be mentioned as the most characteristic specimens. The
problem play is the presentation of a particular case, with a view to a
general conclusion on some important question of human conduct. This
afforded the author, who was, in his way, a moralist and a reformer,
excellent opportunities for humorous discussions and the display of that
familiar eloquence which was his greatest gift and most effective
faculty. Among other subjects, the social position of women had an
all-powerful attraction for his mind, and many of his later plays were
written with the object of placing in strong relief the remarkable
inequality of the sexes, both as regards freedom of action and
responsibility, in modern marriage. Like all the dramatists of his time,
he adhered to Scribe's mode of play-writing--a mixture of the _drame
bourgeois_, as initiated by Diderot, and the comedy of character and
manners, long in vogue--from the days of Molière, Regnard, Destouches
and Marivaux, down to the beginning of the 19th century. In his prefaces
Dumas often undertook the defence of the system which, in his
estimation, was best calculated to serve the purpose of the artist, the
humorist and the moralist--a dramatist being, as he conceived, a
combination of the three.
Though the majority of French playgoers continued to side with him, and
to cling to the time-honoured theatrical beliefs, a few young men were
beginning to murmur against the too elaborate mechanism and artificial
logic. Scribe and his successors, whose plays were a combination of
comedy and drama, were wont to devote the first act to a brilliant and
witty presentation of personages, then to crowd the following scenes
with incidents, until the action was brought to a climax about the end
of the fourth act, invariably concluding, in the fifth, with an
optimistic _dénouement_, just before midnight, the time appointed by
police regulations for the closing of playhouses. At the same time a
more serious and far-reaching criticism was levelled at the very
principles on which the conception of human life was then dependent. A
new philosophy, based on scientific research, had been gradually gaining
ground and penetrating the French mind. A host of bold writers had been
trying, with considerable firmness and continuity of purpose, to start a
new kind of fiction, writing in perfect accordance with the determinist
theories of Auguste Comte, Darwin and Taine. The long-disputed success
of the Naturalistic School carried everything before it during the years
1875-1885, and its triumphant leaders were tempted to make the best of
their advantage by annexing a new province and establishing a footing on
the stage. In this they failed signally, either when they were assisted
by professional dramatists or when left to their own resources. It
became evident that Naturalism, to be made acceptable on the stage,
would have to undergo a special process of transformation and be handled
in a peculiar way. Henry Becque succeeded in embodying the new theories
in two plays, which at first met with very indifferent success, but were
revived at a later period, and finally obtained permanent recognition in
the French theatre--even with the acquiescence of the most learned
critics, when they discovered, or fancied they discovered, that Becque's
comedies agreed, in the main, with Molière's conception of dramatic art.
In _Les Corbeaux_ and _La Parisienne_ the plot is very simple; the
episodes are incidents taken from ordinary life. No extraneous character
is introduced to discuss moral and social theories, or to acquaint us
with the psychology of the real _dramatis personae_, or to suggest
humorous observations about the progress of the dramatic action. The
characters are left to tell their own tale in their own words, which are
sometimes very comical, sometimes very repulsive, but purport to be
always true to nature. Human will, which was the soul and mainspring of
French tragedy in the 17th century, and played such a paramount part in
the _drame bourgeois_ and the _haute comédie_ of the 19th, appears in M.
Becque's plays to have fallen from its former exalted position and to
have ceased to be a free agent. It is a mere passive instrument to our
inner desires and instincts and appetites, which, in their turn, obey
natural laws. Thus, in Becque's comedies, as in the old Greek drama,
destiny, not man, is the chief actor, the real but unseen protagonist.
Becque was not a prolific writer, and when he died, in 1899, it was
remarked that he had spent the last ten years of his life in comparative
inactivity. But during these years his young and ardent disciples had
spared no effort in putting their master's theories to the test. It had
occurred to a gifted and enterprising actor-manager, named André
Antoine, that the time had come for trying dramatic experiments in a
continued and methodical manner. For this purpose he gathered around him
a number of young authors, and produced their plays before a select
audience of subscribers, who had paid in advance for their
season-tickets. The entertainment was a strictly private one. In this
way Antoine made himself independent of the censors, and at the same
time was no longer obliged to consider the requirements of the average
playgoer, as is the case with ordinary managers, anxious, above all
things, to secure long runs. At the Théâtre Libre the most successful
play was not to be performed for more than three nights.
The reform attempted was to consist in the elimination of what was
contrary to nature in Dumas's and Augier's comedies: of the _intrigue
parallèle_ or underplot, of the over-numerous and improbable incidents
which followed the first act and taxed the spectator's memory to the
verge of fatigue; and, lastly, of the conventional _dénouement_ for
which there was no justification. A true study of character was to take
the place of Sardou's complicated fabrications and Dumas's problem
plays. The authors would present the spectator with a fragment of life,
but would force no conclusion upon him at the termination of the play.
The reformation in histrionic art was to proceed apace. The actors and
actresses of the preceding period had striven to give full effect to
certain witty utterances of the author, or to preserve and to develop
their own personal peculiarities or oddities. Antoine and his
fellow-artists did their best to make the public realize, in every word
and every gesture, the characteristic features and ruling passions of
the men and women they were supposed to represent.
It was in the early autumn of 1887 that the Théâtre Libre opened its
doors for the first time. It struggled on for eight years amidst
unfailing curiosity, but not without encountering some adverse, or even
derisive, criticism from a considerable portion of the public and the
press. The Théâtre Libre brought under public notice such men as George
Courteline and George Ancey, who gave respectively, in _Bonbouroche_ and
_La Dupe_, specimens of a comic vein called the "_comique cruel_."
Fabre, in _L'Argent_, approached if not surpassed his master, Henry
Becque. Brieux, in _Blanchette_, gave promise of talent, which he has
since in a great measure justified. In _Les Fossiles_ and _L'Envers
d'une sainte_, by François de Curel, were found evidences of dramatic
vigour and concentrated energy, allied with a remarkable gift for the
minute analysis of feeling. Antoine's activity was not exclusively
confined to the efforts of the French Naturalistic School; he included
the Norwegian drama in his programme, and successively produced several
of Ibsen's plays. They received a large amount of attention from the
critics, the views then expressed ranging from the wildest enthusiasm to
the bitterest irony. Francisque Sarcey was decidedly hostile, and Jules
Lemaître, who ranked next to him in authority, ventured to suggest that
Ibsen's ideas were nothing better than long-discarded social and
literary paradoxes, borrowed from Pierre Leroux through George Sand, and
returned to the French market as novelties. Ibsen was not understood by
the French public at large, though his influence could be clearly traced
on thoughtful men like Paul Hervieu and François de Curel.
The authors of the Théâtre Libre were sadly wanting in tact and
patience. They went at once to extremes, and, while trying to free
themselves from an obsolete form of drama, fell into a state of anarchy.
If a too elaborate plot is a fault, no plot at all is an absurdity. The
old school had been severely taken to task for devoting the first act to
the delineation of character, and the delineation of character was now
found to have extended over the whole play; and worse still, most of
these young men seemed to find pleasure in importing a low vocabulary on
to the stage; they made it their special object to place before the
spectator revolting pictures of the grossest immorality. In this they
were supported by a knot of noisy and unwise admirers, whose misplaced
approval largely contributed towards bringing an otherwise useful and
interesting undertaking into disrepute. The result was that after the
lapse of eight years the little group collected round Antoine had lost
in cohesion and spirit, that it was both less hopeful and less compact
than it had been at the outset of the campaign. But some authors who had
kept aloof from the movement were not slow in reaping the moral and
intellectual profit of these tentative experiments. Among them must be
cited George de Porto-Riche, Henri Lavedan, Paul Hervieu, Maurice Donnay
and Jules Lemaître. Alone among the authors of the Théâtre Libre, É.
Brieux secured an assured position on the regular stage. Instead of
attacking the vices and follies of his times, he has made a name by
satirizing the weak points or the wrong application of certain
fundamental principles by which modern institutions are supported. He
mocked at universal suffrage in _L'Engrenage_, at art in _Ménages
d'artistes_, at popular instruction in _Blanchette_, at charity in _Les
Bienfaiteurs_, at science in _L'Évasion_, and then at law in _La Robe
rouge_. Of _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_, one is an old maid with a
strong bent towards mysticism, another is a star in the demi-monde, and
the third is married. Neither religion, nor free love, nor marriage has
made one of the three happy. The strange fact about Brieux is that he
propounds his uncomfortable ideas with an incredible amount of dash and
spirit.
All the plays written by the above-mentioned authors, and by those who
follow in their steps, have been said to constitute the "new comedy."
But one may question the advisability of applying the same name to
literary works which present so little, if any, family likeness. It was
tacitly agreed to remove the intricacies of the plot and the forced
_dénouement_. But no one will trace in those plays the uniformity of
moral purpose which would justify us in comprising them under the same
head, as products of the same school. Then, before the Naturalistic, or
half-Naturalistic, School had attained to a practical result or taken a
definite shape, a wave of Romanticism swept over the French public, and
in a measure brought back the old artistic and literary dogmas
propounded by Victor Hugo and the generation of 1830. Signs of a revival
in French dramatic poetry were not lacking. The success of _La Fille de
Roland_, by the Vicomte de Bornier, was restricted to the more
cultivated classes, but the vogue of Jean Richepin's _Chemineau_ was at
once general and lasting. _Cyrano de Bergerac_, produced in the last
days of 1897, brought a world-wide reputation to its young author,
Edmond Rostand. This play combines sparkling wit and brilliancy of
imagination with delightful touches of pathos and delicate tenderness.
It was assumed that Rostand was endowed to an extraordinary degree both
with theatrical genius and the poetic faculty. _L'Aiglon_ fell short of
this too favourable judgment. It is more a dramatic poem than a real
drama, and the author handles history with the same childish
incompetence and inaccuracy as Hugo did in _Cromwell_, in _Ruy Blas_ and
_Hernani_. The persistent approbation of the public seemed, however, to
indicate a growing taste for poetry, even when unsupported by dramatic
interest--a curious symptom among the least poetical of modern European
races.
To sum up, the French, as regards the present condition of their drama,
were confronted with two alternative movements. Naturalism, furthered by
science and philosophy, was contending against traditions three
centuries old, and seemed unable to crystallize into masterly works;
while romantic drama, founded on vague and exploded theories, had become
embodied in productions of real artistic beauty, which have been warmly
welcomed by the general playgoer. It should nevertheless be noted that
in _Cyrano_ and _L'Aiglon_ human will, which was the main-spring of
Corneille's tragedy and Hugo's drama, tried to reassert itself, but was
baffled by circumstance, and had to submit to inexorable laws. This
showed that the victorious school would have to reckon with the
doctrines of the defeated party, and suggested that a determinist
theatre might be the ultimate outcome of a compromise. (A. FI.)
(f) _English Drama._
Among the nations of Germanic descent the English alone succeeded,
mainly through the influence of the Renaissance movement, in
transforming the later growths of the medieval drama into the beginnings
of a great and enduring national dramatic literature, second neither in
volume nor in splendour to any other in the records of the world. And,
although in England, as elsewhere, the preparatory process had been
continuing for some generations, its consummation coincided with one of
the greatest epochs of English national history, and indeed forms one of
the chief glories of that epoch itself; so that, in thinking or speaking
of the Elizabethan age and the Elizabethan drama, the one can scarcely
be thought or spoken of without the other.
Beginnings of the regular drama.
It is of course conceivable that the regular drama, or drama proper,
might in England have been called into life without the direct influence
of classical examples. Already in the reign of Edward VI. the spirit of
the Reformation had (with the aid of a newly awakened desire for the
study of history, which was no doubt largely due to Italian examples)
quickened the relatively inanimate species of the morality into the
beginning of a new development.[155] But though the _Kyng Johan_ of Bale
(much as this author abhorred the chronicles as written by
ecclesiastics) came very near to the chronicle histories, there is no
proof whatever that the work, long hidden away for very good reasons,
actually served as a transition to the new species; and Bale's
production was entirely unknown to the particular chronicle history
which treated the same subject. Before the earliest example of this
transitional species was produced, English tragedy had directly
connected its beginnings with classical models.
Imitation of classical examples.
Much in the same way, nothing could have been more natural and in
accordance with the previous sluggish evolution of the English drama
than that a gradual transition, however complete in the end, should have
been effected from the moralities to comedy. It was not, however, John
Heywood himself who was to accomplish any such transition; possibly, he
was himself the author of the morality _Genus humanum_ performed at the
coronation feast of Queen Mary, whose council speedily forbade the
performance of interludes without the queen's licence. Nor are we able
to conjecture the nature of the pieces bearing this name composed by
Richard Farrant, afterwards the master of the Children of St George's at
Windsor, or of William Hunnis, master under Queen Elizabeth of the
Children of the Chapel Royal. But the process of transition is visible
in productions, also called interludes, but charged with serious
purpose, such as T. Ingeland's noteworthy _Disobedient Child_ (before
1560), and plays in which the element of abstractions is perceptibly
yielding to that of real personages, or in which the characters are for
the most part historical or the main element in the action belongs to
the sphere of romantic narrative.[156] The demonstration would, however,
be alien to the purpose of indicating the main conditions of the growth
of the English drama. The immediate origin of the earliest extant
English comedy must, like that of the first English tragedy, be sought,
not in the development of any popular literary or theatrical
antecedents, but in the imitation, more or less direct, of classical
models. This cardinal fact, unmistakable though it is, has frequently
been ignored or obscured by writers intent upon investigating the
_origines_ of our drama, and to this day remains without adequate
acknowledgment in most of the literary histories accessible to the great
body of students.
It is true that in tracing the entrance of the drama into the national
literature there is no reason for seeking to distinguish very narrowly
between the several tributaries to the main stream which fertilized this
as well as other fields under Renaissance culture. The universities then
still remained, and for a time became more prominently than ever, the
leading agents of education in all its existent stages; and it is a
patent fact that no influence could have been so strong upon the
Elizabethan dramatists as that to which they had been subjected during
the university life through which the large majority of them had passed.
The corporate life of the universities, and the enthusiasms (habitually
unanimous) of their undergraduates and younger graduates, communicated
this influence, as it were automatically, to the students, and to the
learned societies themselves, of the Inns of Court. In the Tudor, as
afterwards in the early Stuart, times, these Inns were at once the
seminaries of loyalty, and the obvious resort for the supply of young
men of spirit desirous of honouring a learned court by contributing to
its choicer amusements. Thus, whether we trace them in the universities,
in the "bowers" or halls of the lawyers, or in the palaces of the
sovereign, the beginnings of the English academical drama, which in
later Elizabethan and Jacobean literature cannot claim to be more than a
subordinate species of the national drama, in an earlier period served
as the actual link between classical tragedy and comedy and the
surviving native growths, and supplied the actual impulse towards the
beginnings of English tragedy and comedy.
The earlier academical drama.
The academical drama of the early years of Elizabeth's reign and of the
preceding part of the Tudor period--including the school-drama in the
narrower sense of the term and other performances of academical
origin--consisted, apart from actual reproductions of classical plays in
original Latin or in Latin versions of the Greek, in adaptations of
Latin originals, or of Latin or English plays directly modelled on
classical examples. A notable series of plays of this kind was performed
in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, from the first year of Edward VI.
onward, when N. Grimald's _Archipropheta_, treating in classic form the
story of St John the Baptist, but introducing the Vice and comic scenes,
was brought out.[157] Others were J. Calfhill's _Progne_ and R.
Edwardes' _Palaemon and Arcyte_ (both 1566), and, from about 1580
onwards, a succession of Latin plays by William Gager, beginning with
the tragedy _Meleager_, and including, with other tragedies,[158] a
comedy _Rivales_. Yet another comedy, acted at Christ Church, and
extolled in 1591 by Harington for "harmless mirth," was the _Bellum
grammaticale_, or Civil War between Nouns and Verbs, which may have been
a revision of a comedy written by Bale's friend, R. Radcliff, in 1538,
but of which in any case the ultimate origin was a celebrated Italian
allegorical treatise.[159] In Cambridge, as is not surprising, the
activity of the early academical friends and favourers of the drama was
even more marked. At St John's College, where Bishop Watson's Latin
tragedy called _Absolom_ was produced within the years 1534 and 1544,
plays were, according to Ascham, repeatedly performed about the middle
of the century; at Christ's a controversial drama in the Lutheran
interest called _Pammachius_, of which Gardiner complained to the privy
council, and which seems afterwards to have been translated by Bale, was
acted in 1544; and at Trinity there was a long series of performances
which began with Christopherson's _Jephtha_ about 1546, and consisted
partly of reproductions of classical works,[160] partly of plays and
"shows" unnamed; while on one occasion at all events, in 1559, "two
English plays" were produced. In 1560 was acted, doubtless in the
original Latin, and not in Palsgrave's English translation (1540) for
schoolboys, the celebrated "comedy" of _Acolastus_, by W. Gnaphaeus, on
the story of the Prodigal Son. The long series of Trinity plays
interspersed with occasional plays at King's (where Udall's _Ezechias_
was produced in English in 1564), at St John's (where T. Legge's
_Richardus III._ was first acted in 1573), and, as will be seen below,
at Christ's, continued, with few noticeable breaks, up to the time when
the Elizabethan drama was in full activity.[161] Among the "academical"
plays not traceable to any particular university source may be
mentioned, as acted at court so early as the end of 1565 or the
beginning of 1566, the Latin _Sapientia Solomonis_, which generally
follows the biblical narrative, but introduces a comic element in the
sayings of the popular Marcolph, who here appears as a court fool.
Influence of Seneca.
It was under the direct influence of the Renaissance, viewed primarily,
in England as elsewhere, as a revival of classical studies, and in
connexion with the growing taste in university and cognate circles of
society, and at a court which prided itself on its love and patronage of
learning, that English tragedy and comedy took their actual beginnings.
Those of comedy, as it would seem, preceded those of tragedy by a few
years. Already in Queen Mary's reign, translation was found the readiest
form of expression offering itself to literary scholarship; and Italian
examples helped to commend Seneca, the most modern of the ancient
tragedians, and the imitator of the most human among the masters of
Attic tragedy, as a favourite subject for such exercises. In the very
year of Elizabeth's accession--seven years after Jodelle had brought out
the earliest French tragedy--a group of English university scholars
began to put forth a series of translations of the ten tragedies of
Seneca, which one of them, T. Newton, in 1581 collected into a single
volume. The earliest of these versions was that of the _Troades_ (1559)
by Jasper Heywood, a son of the author of the _Interludes_. He also
published the _Thyestes_ (1560) and the _Hercules Furens_ (1561); the
names of his fellow-translators were A. Neville, T. Nuce, J. Studley and
the T. Newton aforesaid. These translations, which occasionally include
original interpolations ("additions," a term which was to become a
technical one in English dramaturgy), are in no instance in blank verse,
the favourite metre of the dialogue being the couplets of
fourteen-syllable lines best known through Chapman's _Homer_.
Earliest English tragedies.
The authority of Seneca, once established in the English literary world,
maintained itself there long after English drama had emancipated itself
from the task of imitating this pallid model, and, occasionally,
Seneca's own prototype, Euripides.[162] Nor can it be doubted that some
translation of the Latin tragic poet had at one time or another passed
through Shakespeare's own hands. But what is of present importance is
that to the direct influence of Seneca is to be ascribed the composition
of the first English tragedy which we possess. Of _Gorboduc_ (afterwards
re-named _Ferrex and Porrex_), first acted on the 18th of January 1562
by the members of the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth, the first
three acts are stated to have been written by T. Norton; the rest of the
play (if not more) was the work of T. Sackville, afterwards Lord
Buckhurst and earl of Dorset, whom Jasper Heywood praised for his
sonnets, but who is better known for his leading share in The _Mirror
for Magistrates_. Though the subject of _Gorboduc_ is a British legend,
and though the action is neither copied nor adapted from any treated by
Seneca, yet the resemblance between this tragedy and the _Thebais_ is
too strong to be fortuitous. In all formal matters--chorus, messengers,
&c.--_Gorboduc_ adheres to the usage of classical tragedy; but the
authors show no respect for the unities of time or place. Strong in
construction, the tragedy is--like its model, Seneca--weak in
characterization. The dialogue, it should be noticed, is in blank verse;
and the device of the _dumb-show_, in which the contents of each act are
in succession set forth in pantomime only, is employed at once to
instruct and to stimulate the spectator.
The nearly contemporary _Apius and Virginia_ (c. 1563), though it takes
its subject--destined to become a perennial one on the modern
stage--from Roman story; the _Historie of Horestes_ (pr. 1567); and T.
Preston's _Cambises King of Percia_ (1569-1570), are somewhat rougher in
form, and, the first and last of them at all events, more violent in
diction, than _Gorboduc_. They still contain elements of the moralities
(above all the Vice) and none of the formal features of classical
tragedy. But a _Julyus Sesyar_ seems to have been performed, in
precisely the same circumstances as _Gorboduc_, so early as 1562; and,
four years later, G. Gascoigne, the author of the satire _The Steele
Glass_, produced with the aid of two associates (F. Kinwelmersh and Sir
Christopher Yelverton, who wrote an epilogue), _Jocasta_, a virtual
translation of L. Dolce's _Giocasta_, which was an adaptation, probably,
of R. Winter's Latin translation of the _Phoenissae_ of Euripides.[163]
Between the years 1567 and 1580 a large proportion of the plays
presented at court by choir- or school-boys, and by various companies of
actors, were taken from Greek legend or Roman history; as was R.
Edwardes' _Damon and Pithias_ (perhaps as early as 1564-1565), which
already shades off from tragedy into what soon came to be called
tragi-comedy.[164] Simultaneously with the influence, exercised directly
or indirectly, of classical literature, that of Italian, both dramatic
and narrative, with its marked tendency to treat native themes, asserted
itself, and, while diversifying the current of early English tragedy,
infused into it a long-abiding element of passion. There are sufficient
grounds for concluding that a play on the subject of _Romeo and Juliet_,
which L. da Porto and M. Bandello had treated in prose narrative--that
of the latter having through a French version formed itself into an
English poem--was seen on an English stage in or before 1562. _Gismonde
of Salerne_, a play founded on Boccaccio, was acted before Queen
Elizabeth at the Inner Temple in 1568, nearly a generation before it was
published, rewritten in blank verse by R. Wilmot, one of the performers,
then in holy orders; G. Whetstone's _Promos and Cassandra_, founded on
G. Cinthio (from which came the plot of _Measure for Measure_),
followed, printed in 1578; and there were other "casts of Italian
devices" belonging to this age, in which the choice of a striking theme
still seemed the chief preoccupation of English tragic poets.
From the double danger which threatened English tragedy in the days of
its infancy--that it would congeal on the wintry heights of classical
themes, or dissolve its vigour in the glowing heat of a passion fiercer
than that of the Italians--_Ingleso Italianato è un diavolo
incarnato_--it was preserved more than by any other cause by its happy
association with the traditions of the national history. An exceptional
position might seem to be in this respect occupied by T. Hughes'
interesting tragedy _The Misfortunes of Arthur_ (1587). But the author
of this play--in certain portions of whose framework there were
associated with him seven other members of Gray's Inn, including Francis
Bacon, and which was presented before Queen Elizabeth like
_Gorboduc_--in truth followed the example of the authors of that work
both in choice of theme, in details of form, and in a general though far
from servile imitation of the manner of Seneca; nor does he represent
any very material advance upon the first English tragedy.
Chronicle histories.
Fortunately, at the very time when from such beginnings as those just
described the English tragic drama was to set forth upon a course in
which it was to achieve so much, a new sphere of activity suggested
itself. And in this, after a few more or less tentative efforts, English
dramatists very speedily came to feel at home. In their direct
dramatization of passages or portions of English history (in which the
doings and sufferings of King Arthur could only by courtesy or poetic
licence be included) classical models would be of scant service, while
Italian examples of the treatment of national historical subjects,
having to deal with material so wholly different, could not be followed
with advantage. The native species of the _chronicle history_, which
designedly assumed this name in order to make clear its origin and
purpose, essayed nothing more or less than a dramatic version of an
existing chronicle. Obviously, while the transition from half
historical, half epical narrative often implied carrying over into the
new form some of the features of the old, it was only when the subject
matter had been remoulded and recast that a true dramatic action could
result. But the _histories_ to be found among the plays of Shakespeare
and one or two other Elizabethans are true dramas, and it would be
inconvenient to include these in the transitional species of those known
as _chronicle histories_. Among these ruder compositions, which
intermixed the blank verse introduced on the Stage by _Gorboduc_ with
prose, and freely combined or placed side by side tragic and comic
ingredients, we have but few distinct examples. One of these is _The
Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth_, known to have been acted before
1588; in which both the verse and the prose are frequently of a very
rude sort, while it is neither divided into acts or scenes nor, in
general, constructed with any measure of dramatic skill. But its vigour
and freshness are considerable, and in many passages we recognize
familiar situations and favourite figures in later masterpieces of the
English historical drama. The second is _The Troublesome Raigne of King
John_, in two parts (printed in 1591), an epical narrative transferred
to the stage, neither a didactic effort like Bale's, nor a living drama
like Shakespeare's, but a far from contemptible treatment of its
historical theme. _The True Chronicle History of King Leir_ (acted in
1593) in form resembles the above, though it is not properly on a
national subject (its story is taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth); but,
with all its defects, it seems only to await the touch of the master's
hand to become a tragedy of supreme effectiveness. A yet further step
was taken in the _Tragedy of Sir Thomas More_ (c. 1590)--in which
Shakespeare's hand has been thought traceable, and which deserves its
designation of "tragedy" not so much on account of the relative nearness
of the historical subject to the date of its dramatic treatment, as
because of the tragic responsibility of character here already clearly
worked out.
Earliest comedies.
Such had been the beginnings of tragedy in England up to the time when
the genius of English dramatists was impelled by the spirit that
dominates a great creative epoch of literature to seize the form ready
to their hands. The birth of English comedy, at all times a process of
less labour and eased by an always ready popular responsiveness to the
most tentative efforts of art, had slightly preceded that of her serious
sister. As has been seen from the brief review given above of the early
history of the English academical drama, isolated Latin comedies had
been performed in the original or in English versions as early as the
reign of Henry VIII.--perhaps even earlier; while the morality and its
direct descendant, the interlude, pointed the way towards popular
treatment in the vernacular of actions and characters equally well
suited for the diversion of Roman, Italian and English audiences. Thus
there was no innovation in the adaptation by N. Udal (q.v.) of the
_Miles Gloriosus_ of Plautus under the title of _Ralph Roister Doister_,
which may claim to be the earliest extant English comedy. It has a
genuinely popular vein of humour, and the names fit the characters after
a fashion familiar to the moralities. The second English comedy--in the
opinion of at least one high authority our first--is _Misogonus_, which
was certainly written as early as 1560. Its scene is laid in Italy; but
the Vice, commonly called "Cacurgus," is both by himself and others
frequently designated as "Will Summer," in allusion to Henry VIII.'s
celebrated jester. _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, long regarded as the
earliest of all _English_ comedies, was printed in 1575, as acted "not
long ago in Christ's College, Cambridge." Its authorship was till
recently attributed to John Still (afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells),
who was a resident M.A. at Christ's, when a play was performed there in
1566. But the evidence of his authorship is inconclusive, and the play
"made by Mr. S., Master of Arts," may be by William Stevenson, or by
some other contemporary. This comedy is slighter in plot and coarser in
diction than _Ralph Roister Doister_, but by no means unamusing.
In the main, however, early English comedy, while occasionally
introducing characters and scenes of thoroughly native origin and
complexion (e.g. Grim, the Collier of Croydon),[165] was content to
borrow its themes fro
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