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Drama

During the Renaissance, drama came into its own as an art form. Although early types of plays had appeared as early as the 1200s, they were usually performed as part of a festival, not as events by themselves. Scholars of the Middle Ages had studied the drama of the ancient world, but they treated it as literature, suitable for reading rather than performing. Playwrights of the Renaissance revived classical* comedy and tragedy and brought them from the bookshelf to the stage.

RELIGIOUS DRAMA

Religious theater arose during the late Middle Ages. By around 1350, most of western and southern Europe had adopted three basic forms of religious drama: the passion play, the miracle play, and the morality play. These forms remained popular until the early 1600s.

Passion plays, also known as mystery plays, were elaborate outdoor presentations of scenes from the Bible, often featuring events from the life of Christ. Performances ran for days or even weeks, involving hundreds of people at various locations throughout a city or town. A play in progress dominated the social, economic, and cultural life of the city. This form of drama reached its height around 1400 in England and 1500 in France and the Holy Roman Empire*.

Miracle plays recounted the lives of saints and the miracles they performed. In Italy, especially in Florence and Rome, passion and miracle plays often formed part of great religious pageants in honor of Holy Week (the week before Easter) or of a city's patron saint. The actors set up carts and moved their performance throughout the city. The productions often featured music and elaborate costumes. Confraternities—groups of laypeople* who joined together for religious and social activities—often wrote and performed passion and miracle plays. Nuns in convents occasionally produced these types of plays as well.

Another form of religious drama, the morality play, became particularly popular in northern France and the Netherlands. These plays were allegories* in which each character represented some human quality. One of the most famous morality plays, Everyman (ca. 1495), retold the story of a human being's spiritual journey from birth to death. During the play Everyman encounters such characters as Strength and Good Deeds.

In the early 1500s church officials began to view passion and miracle plays as sacrilegious*. Authorities tried to ban them in France, England, Italy, and the Protestant lands of the Holy Roman Empire. However, many actors continued to perform them.

TRAGEDY

Although scholars of the Middle Ages studied tragic drama, they tended to see it as poetry rather than theater. Humanists* began writing new tragedies, based on ancient Roman models, as early as the 1300s, but they did not produce these works on the stage. However, in the mid-1500s playwrights and critics began to see the spectator, rather than the reader, as the proper audience for tragedy. At the same time, the discovery of ancient Greek tragedies by Sophocles, Euripides, and other authors helped fuel interest in the genre*.

As dramatists set out to revive this ancient form, they turned to classical sources for guidance. Their main references were Poetics, by the Greek philosopher ARISTOTLE, and Ars Poetica, by the Roman poet Horace. Authors engaged in lively debates about whether it was better to imitate the Greeks or the Romans and about whether plots should be based on fictional or historical events.

Slowly, tragedy came out of the scholarly study and onto the stage. In 1541 the Italian playwright Giambattista Cinzio Giraldi became the first to present a tragedy on stage. The performance of his play Orbecche revived the tragic tradition, which became an immediate success. Patrons* commissioned new plays and financed stage productions. Because Italy had no public theaters at the time, these plays appeared in private homes or at court.

Tragic Themes. Renaissance playwrights believed that their art should educate audiences as well as entertain them. They often began their tragedies with a prologue* that explained how the forces of good and evil would appear in the dramatic action. The prologue advised the audience to learn from the tragic events they were about to see on stage.

However, the playwrights' ideas of right and wrong reflected the changing views of their societies. The many tragedies written about kings show how these ideals changed over time. Early humanists considered honor and glory the chief virtues of a ruler. However, a later generation of dramatists followed the model of author Niccolò MACHIAVELLI, who argued that a monarch should be ruthless. Therefore, the theater encouraged the audience to think about, and perhaps to question, their society's changing values and beliefs.

Tragedies also presented society's conflicting views about the role of women. Female victims in tragedy often appeared as weak, overemotional characters of limited intelligence. However, in other cases women were strong, intelligent individuals seeking the respect they deserved. Their courage in the face of death inspired admiration from audiences, both at court and in the general public.

Tragic Effects. The power of theater as a cultural force depended largely on its ability to draw the audience into the story. Playwrights struggled to make the world on stage seem more real through their use of language and stage effects.

Dramatists drew their audiences in by writing in the local language, rather than in Latin. They also updated the settings, costumes, and actions of their plays to reflect the society of their time. However, writers continued to rely on the classical tradition in their use of language. They tended to include many verbal flourishes and to show off their knowledge of ancient literature.

This emphasis on language has earned Renaissance tragedies the reputation of being too "talky," better for reading than for performing. However, this complaint overlooks the other devices playwrights used to add interest to their tragedies, such as costumes, movement, sound, and blocking (the placement of characters on stage). Dramatists developed a clever trick for presenting events such as murders and crowd scenes, which they could not easily show on the stage. They had characters onstage watch events occurring offstage and describing what they saw. This technique expanded the world of the play beyond the borders of the stage, enabling the audience to witness the action without seeing it directly. Playwrights also used sound and lighting to signal events taking place offstage. A blare of trumpets could hint at a procession, while thunderbolts and flashes of lightning suggested a violent storm.

ERUDITE COMEDY

Popular as tragedy became, it never achieved the same appeal as comedy. During the Renaissance, playwrights developed a new style of comedy based on the works of ancient Roman dramatists, such as Plautus and Terence. They referred to this form as erudite (learned) comedy. The name suggests that they viewed it as a serious art form, suitable for noble or scholarly audiences.

Erudite comedy began in Italy in the 1400s. Its basic features were copied from classical comedy. Playwrights divided their works into five acts, all occurring on the same day and in the same place—usually an Italian city street or courtyard. They populated the stage with characters who fit the setting, such as servants, soldiers, innkeepers, and peddlers. Most dramatists reinforced the familiar feeling of the setting by writing in prose rather than verse. They also used the language the audience knew, although some characters might speak in foreign languages or regional dialects.

Erudite comedies often had complicated plots with two or more story lines entwined together. They tended to rely on devices such as tricks, disguises, mistaken identities, and practical jokes. The heroes of the piece were often young lovers who, with the help of their clever servants, outwitted the old men who tried to keep them apart. Broad physical humor, known as slapstick, played a major role in the action. However, within these silly and twisted plots, playwrights found room to slip in comments about politics, local events, and issues ranging from education and marriage to the use of cosmetics.

Certain plot devices became standard features in erudite comedy. Eavesdropping, cross-dressing, misunderstood letters, and switching bedmates in the dark all appeared repeatedly in different plays. Comedies also relied heavily on specific types of action, such as commenting on the action in asides*, exchanging insults, and talking from windows. As late as the 1600s, playwrights such as William SHAKESPEARE and the French dramatist Molière continued to use these elements in their works.

(See also Commedia dell'Arte; Drama, English; Drama, French; Drama, Spanish; Middle Ages; Theaters.)

* classical

in the tradition of ancient Greece and Rome

* Holy Roman Empire

political body in central Europe composed of several states; existed until 1806

* laypeople

those who are not members of the clergy

* allegory

literary or artistic device in which characters, events, and settings represent abstract qualities and in which the author intends a different meaning to be read beneath the surface

* sacrilegious

disrespectful of sacred things

* humanist

Renaissance expert in the humanities (the languages, literature, history, and speech and writing techniques of ancient Greece and Rome)

* genre

literary form

* patron

supporter or financial sponsor of an artist or writer

* prologue

introduction to a literary work

A Typical Comedy

The play Calandria (The Follies of Calandro), by Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, provides a typical example of the plot of an erudite comedy. It involves a pair of abandoned twins, one male and one female, searching for each other throughout Rome. The male twin falls in love with the unsatisfied wife of an old man named Calandro. Through a series of tricks, disguises, and mistakes, managed by a clever servant, the female twin eventually becomes engaged to Calandro's son, while the male twin becomes the lover of Calandro's wife.

* aside

remark made by a character onstage to the audience or to another character, not heard by other characters in the same scene